Optimistic People and Pessimistic People

After reading Seligman's five-volume series on happiness, I was a bit astonished: it turns out there are people in the world like Seligman—to whom joy and happiness are a life feeling that must be trained to be attained.

This is because I am by nature a positive and optimistic person. Although I feel life has no great meaning, I am someone who easily feels joy and happiness in the trivial details of life; I am easily contented and delighted. Seligman, as he himself says, is not a born optimist.

Yet the root cause of this enormous difference between people is something we cannot change: the genes we inherit from our parents. That is to say, those of us who are naturally gifted with joy are the ones blessed by heaven—mysteriously, the Creator let us inherit good genes from our parents.

Optimists can scarcely understand pessimists. Unless they have received professional psychological training, they may instinctively regard pessimists as people with problematic thinking who bring it on themselves. Ordinary people are unlikely to sympathize with or accept those around them who are prone to pessimism, depression, anxiety, and anger; only professional psychologists know that these people's problems are far from solved by simply adjusting their thoughts.

A worry that seems trivially easy to an optimist is, to a pessimist, an uncrossable mountain. From the standpoint of positive psychology, Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Chan Buddhism, was a typical optimist, which is why his meditation could be completed through sudden enlightenment; his elder brother, the monk Shenxiu, was a typical pessimist, which is why he had to rely on gradual cultivation to attain the Way.

The Buddha Sakyamuni himself, on the other hand, was a thoroughgoing pessimist. Although born into a royal house, he felt no happiness at all, and chose to leave home in order to resolve his own afflictions.

To someone like me, although the Buddhist scriptures contain plenty of philosophy, the Dharma is just too cumbersome; only a pessimist could have invented such an elaborate contraption to overcome affliction. It is far easier for optimists to be happy—a flower blooming, a bird singing melodiously, can immediately make an optimist forget their troubles.

Seligman is quite right that only someone by nature as pessimistic as he is could design such a clear and complete program for perceiving happiness. For those who are optimistic and positive, happiness and joy are things that come naturally without a thought. So optimists almost never need to train themselves to be "happy" or "joyful"; for them, happiness and joy require no extra steps—when I am happy, I am happy, without having to watch my rising thoughts.

To the pessimistic and negative, the optimistic and positive also seem like people from another world. Pessimistic, negative people have inherited many self-protective genes from our ancestors: anger, fear, anxiety, suspicion, vigilance—these were originally instinctive reactions by which humans protected themselves.

But unfortunately, in many people this primitive imprint runs too deep, so that they always live in tension and unease; even sadder, the people around them cannot understand their tension and unease. So they are like prisoners confined by themselves, with great difficulty extricating themselves from this tension and unease.

Outsiders always think it is just "drama," believing that if only they "would look on the bright side," everything would be fine. In reality it is not so: they understand the reasoning well, yet they are still deeply unhappy, because they are in a state of "learned helplessness." Their genes are not strong enough to fend off sorrow and anger, and they find it hard to be tolerant and broad-minded.

Seligman deepened my understanding of my father and my brother, because they are precisely pessimists. I, on the other hand, inherited my mother's optimistic, positive personality genes; my mother was someone who was easily happy. Had it not been for poverty that caused her, from childhood, to starve herself into a gastric ulcer, she would not have died of gastric cancer so early. Because long-term surveys at the Mayo Clinic in the United States show that optimistic, positive people generally live far longer than pessimistic, negative ones.

I used to find it hard to understand why my father's four brothers were all so prone to anger and holding grudges. For me, hating someone is truly difficult, yet my father was diligently training me to hate those who had wronged us. To his regret, he never succeeded in his whole life: I can let go of hatred very quickly.

I am grateful that my mother was an optimist and passed her fine genes on to me. If humans were not creatures of two-sex reproduction, their offspring would find it truly hard to improve the family genes.

I have been trying hard to change my father, hoping he would get less angry and be happier, because angry people are five times more likely to get heart disease than calm people. In retrospect, much of the persuasive work I did on him was futile, because my approach was wrong: standing in my own shoes I told him to look on the bright side, whereas he probably could not feel my thoughts at all.

For pessimistic, negative people to become positive and optimistic requires long-term self-training with the help of a professional psychotherapist or books, mastering the skill of "learned optimism" to change their "learned helplessness." This is no easy thing. It requires "often diligently wiping it, lest dust alight"; they simply cannot grasp the state of "originally there is nothing, where can dust alight?"

So the Patriarch Hongren, all his life, could never understand or accept his disciple Shenxiu, who was not of his kind; Shenxiu never received Hongren's robe and bowl. Yet many people understood and followed Shenxiu, because his method of practice helped them greatly; their afflictions could only be solved by "often diligently wiping it." For a considerable number of meditation practitioners, only by constantly watching their rising thoughts, as Shenxiu did, can they avoid or reduce affliction.

Pessimistic, negative people are unfortunate; they very much wish they could be calm, happy, and joyful, yet as if controlled by some powerful magic, they find it hard to escape their bad moods.

Moreover, pessimistic, negative people often do not succeed in their careers, because the air of depression and anxiety they carry makes it hard for them to get help from friends or colleagues around them, and they easily and inadvertently bury their own opportunities. For patients with some serious illness, negative emotions are even more likely to bury their chance of being saved; doctors easily give up on risk-taking and efforts for pessimists.

So most pessimistic, negative people are fatalists, while those who are positive and optimistic remain spirited, believing their own fate is one they can control and change. Hence, for pessimists, giving up is routine, and only optimists will persevere to the end. Yet to do anything well, what is needed is perseverance, not giving up.

Pessimists may never succeed the way optimists do in their lifetimes; in the end they can only find comfort in fatalism. And human life does indeed have a fatalistic coloring—first of all, whether a person is positive or negative is not up to them; it is decided by the Creator rolling the dice. Is that not fatalism enough?

Of course, this fatalism can be completely changed, just as Seligman himself did: he can lift himself out of his plight by cultivating his positive psychology.

Optimistic people who are easily happy carry good fortune from birth. So however we humans behave, we should be modest toward our neighbors; when people say someone is lucky, that remark, sour though it may sound, contains a certain truth.

Both optimistic and pessimistic people should work to learn some psychology, so as to better understand those around us who are not quite like us and ultimately achieve mutual care. Do not lightly blame everything on the other person's "problematic thinking"; rather, try to understand the differences in people's ways of thinking and the deep reasons behind them.