What is there to be thankful for around you?
I can list a few:
- Tap water
- Internet access
- Friends
- The fact that I woke up today
- …the list goes on…
When was the last time you were thankful for these things? We, as humans, tend to always look on the darker side of things.
The most common jokes about pessimists is that they always see a half-full cup as half-empty.
There is this interesting theory called “Murphy’s law.” It states that “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
With so many variables involved, crossing the street has multiple outcomes. One could collide with a car without looking both directions, cross safely without looking both directions, et cetera.
There is this thing called hindsight. You’ve probably heard it and also thought of it at least once. “Looking back on it, x was a bad idea” is the general format of hindsight.
Through hindsight bias, when something goes wrong, we tend to remember the event. Not so if everything goes fine. Murphy’s law exploits hindsight bias and makes people (even more?) pessimistic.
We, as humans, are a collective hunk of pessimism. We can always find something to complain about, especially in the “first world.”
I’ll try to do this also, so I encourage my readers to come up with 10 things as soon as we wake up to list and start our day off with optimism. It’s a depression-killer too!