Reticulating Splines

Conan O’Brien’s closing speech in his final episode of the Tonight Show in which he implored his audience to “please, don’t be cynical…if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen…,” really struck a chord with me. It got me thinking about how I spent most of my life being a cynic and a pessimist, highly critical of flaws and constantly expecting to be disappointed. Lately I’ve been taking much better care of myself and working hard to adopt a healthier outlook, and I realised that it takes much more effort to be a positive person than a negative one. It’s easy to see the flaws in things because there will always be flaws to pick out. Expecting the worst to happen gave me a wide safety net to fall back on because when it inevitably happened I was prepared for it and when it didn’t I was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t understand it at the time, but by maintaining that mindset I was seriously limiting the things I could achieve and denying myself of a lot of happiness. It takes more guts to be an optimist because you will be let down and you’ll have to deal with the rejection and disappointment, but dealing with those things and learning to cope with them and learn from them promotes a kind of growth that is impossible to attain when you work yourself into a cycle of cynicism. The cycle then begins to not only affect you, but the people around you.

There is room in the practical worldview for cynicism. It certainly has good uses, but more often than not I find people taking it to an extreme where it begins to color more areas of life than it’s useful for. At that point, it’s just a lot of wasted energy that should be spent on things like being expressive, working on personal growth, and cultivating healthy relationships. I’m not going to lie and say I no longer fall into the trap of feeling like “fuck it all, what’s the use of ANY of this?” I still do, but I’ve finally reached a point where I recognise it’s a dysfunction and am pressured by an increasing urgency to fix it before I’m too hardened and set in my ways. It takes more guts to do that than to settle into comfortable defeatism. It takes more guts to be a positive person than a negative one, and I’m now confident in knowing that I’ve got them.