As we have seen, an irrationally optimistic view of life seems to be a natural and normal set point for humans. It is quite possibly a product of our evolution. Maybe only the optimistic survived in the past. In a Paleolithic world, a pessimist may well end up dead quite quickly.
As far as I am concerned, this idiotic and completely irrational optimism of mine is one of the only reasons I am even able to wake up and get out of bed at all. Now granted, a logical and rational view of my life in the last 20 years or maybe even beyond that would suggest that I don’t have much reason to be optimistic. Going back even 30 years, my life generally doesn’t tend to get much better in the next 2-3 years from any baseline point. In some cases it does. But mostly whatever is sucking in my life tends to be sucking right along down through the years with little to no change.
Nevertheless, when I look at the future, I am almost always making a lot more money than I am making now and am a lot more successful socially than I am now. Both of these views of the future are probably completely irrational, but I always see the future as if it’s going to be a lot better and most of my problems are going to be ameliorated if not eliminated.
Deep down inside, I know that my optimism is irrational, but I don’t much care if it is or not because I simply wish to see the world in this way. Whether it is true or not irrational. Your views of life and many other things need not be based on reality. In fact it is often very healthy to have views of your life and your future that are not based on reality in any way and in fact are utterly irrational.
Which views should you have of life and the future: Fact-based ones or Lie-based ones? I would say that whichever view feels better is the one you should have. If the fact-based view looks like total hopelessness, then I would argue that one should simply create a delusion that things are great and the future is going to resolve everything simply because it feels better to look at things this way. Demanding that we view our lives and futures in a reality based way doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I would think that this demand would condemn a lot of people to misery.