Optimism is often hard to come by these days, especially if you are a frequent consumer of corporate mainstream and/or social media, both of which specialize in disaster, drama, negativity, and pessimism.
Those fortunate enough to find optimism in life are likely to have their own recipe for finding it. So this post is NOT a cut and dry prescription for optimism, especially if you already have your own methods. It's simply a reflection on what has worked for me in my ongoing quest to maximize my optimism. If you get something useful out of it, great. Reuse and recycle.
1. Avoiding Corporate Mainstream News Media: By design, the mainstream media is in the business of covering news, defined as things that happen that are out of the ordinary and usually pessimistic. The ordinary tends to be heavily saturated with optimism. When things are moving along smoothly without incident or drama, that's fantastic. Most news disrupts and destabilizes optimism because it is usually about things that suck, like murders and plane crashes and pundits complaining about how pessimistic everything is. In fact, this is somewhat by design. The corporate advertisers that underwrite mainstream news media make their money on making people feel ill at ease, so that consumers will go buy products or perform behaviors advertised to make them feel better (when people buy stuff, it is primarily driven by a mental cognitive dissonance that needs to be resolved). News outlets know that they make more money in ad revenue if they upset people. This is immortalized in the cliche guiding principle of most mainstream news outlets: "If it bleeds, it leads." How tragically sad and pessimistic. I've found that avoidance of the pessimistic commercial media, including social media (with its anti-intellectual bickering and bullying and ballyhoo), has profound effects on my optimism. You can call it "ignorance is bliss," but that's not the full picture. If the world as conveyed by the mainstream/social media were really as bad as they make it out to be, my avoidance of the media should have no bearing on my perceived quality of life, because the world around me should still be as sh!tty as they want me to believe it is. But the fact is, the world is not that sh!tty. It's pretty effing awesome...and there's proof [SOURCE]. By avoiding 80% of mainstream and 95% of social media, I literally have a more realistic experience of the world around me (aka, reality). And it's not bad at all. I have a pretty great life, and I suspect most people do, notwithstanding corporate media and advertising messages to the contrary. You can believe whatever you want...it's your life. I am just saying my optimism gap has shrunk substantially since I started willful media fasting.
3. Mindfulness/Meditation: I meditate selfishly. I won't deny it. Being able to carve 15-20 minutes out of my day that is exclusively mine to just relax, breathe, and ponder is ridiculously optimism producing. It's my time. I'm told there are literal, concrete health benefits to meditation, like a reduction in stress and its associated maladies. That's cool! Meditation is a specific form of mindfulness, but generally speaking, mindfulness is just being "present" and trying to live in the now, rather than fretting about the past or worrying about the future. I am not suggesting that I am very good at being mindful and present, but the great thing about it is that you don't have to be good at it, you just have to try to be good at it. I think my wife is better at it, and she reminds me to be more present when we are doing things together. Mindfulness for me is definitely augmented by my penchant for mainstream/social media fasting too. The media, by design, inject un-mindful thoughts into people's heads. As described above, they have a hidden agenda to make people worry about the past or the future so that people will seek out products to alleviate worry (including, but not limited to, drugs/alcohol and junk food...see A Vegan Diet below). Without the distractions of mainstream/social media, I find I am much more able to be mindful and I feel generally more alive and present (a sensation I often refer to as feeling "cleaner" mentally).
4. A Vegan Diet: Don't try this at home, especially if you love cheese and eggs and meat and other animal-based foods. I turned 50 years old at the beginning of the year and this in conjunction with my weakness for establishing goal-oriented New Year's Resolutions (NYR) led me to try veganism for a fortnight (after returning from Hawaii...see Palm Trees above) as a personal health challenge. Damned if I didn't start feeling fantastic almost immediately, notwithstanding a winter cold I caught around that same time that lasted for weeks. Most notably, the osteoarthritis that has painfully afflicted my left big toe joint for over 15 years pretty much disappeared. While I haven't noticed any major recovery of the prior flexibility in the joint, the chronic pain that sometimes kept me awake at night has completely disappeared. I did a bit of research on the health benefits of the vegan diet as part of one of my grad school class projects. Indeed, a vegan diet has been shown to reduce osteoarthritis symptoms [SOURCE]. The vegan diet is anti-inflammatory, so I suspect I may have halted progression of the osteoarthritis in my toe, even if I haven't reversed it. I feel like my mood is much more optimistic since I started the vegan diet as well. Obviously, there are a lot of contributing factors to my overall cheery disposition, as this post describes. That being said, there is solid research that a vegan diet can reduce anxiety and depression in people prone to these mental health maladies [SOURCE]. Or maybe it's just a placebo effect! I don't care. My optimism's up and that's all that matters. Additionally, even though I did not establish any caloric restriction guidelines when I implemented this veganism challenge, I lost a pantload of weight on this diet (see also Exercise below). I had not expected this, but I am currently hovering at a body weight that I cannot ever remember being at before, although I probably was back in high school and the early years of college. The initial fortnight of the vegan diet challenge has been extended indefinitely because the health benefits have been so, albeit subjectively, profound. I don't want to reverse the gains!
5. Exercise: I love to go bicycling outdoors. I find that to be the best form of exercise to maximize my optimism, especially when I do it socially with friends. I am lucky to live in a town with a lot of bike trails and bike friendly roads. Bicycling kind of goes hand in hand with Mindfulness/Meditation (see above). When I am out tooling around, I can think (if I am alone) or converse about life (if I am with friends). It's very mindful and grounding, and it doesn't cost hardly anything at all to do. Conversely, when I cannot bike, I go to the gym for exercise, which does cost a bit (though it is worth it). Exercise synergizes well with my veganism, and may explain some of my weight loss, although the current research on diet and exercise suggests 80% of the variability in observed weight loss is due to dietary habits and only 20% is due to exercise [SOURCE]. This is because the human body is very energy homeostatic. When your muscles burn calories during exercise, your body actually slows down cellular metabolism in other tissues and organs to balance your net energy expenditure (this is evolutionary...before modern agriculture, your genes assumed that calories in your diet were fairly constant and very finite, so energy homeostasis promoted survival in a world with limited energy resources). This may explain some of the health-promoting and age-reversing benefits of exercise. It essentially slows down your metabolism, resulting in less oxidative damage to cellular machinery over time. Exercise often gives me a euphoric "runner's high" (cause by natural endorphins and enkephalins) that directly contributes to my overall optimism about life.
6. Performing Music (with caveats): Performing music boosts my optimism under certain environmental conditions, principally those that put me in control as opposed to being at the whimsy of pessimistic live music venues. Crowdfunding house concerts has been a superior model for live music performances for many of my music groups and it has been remarkably optimism enhancing for me, my music groups, and our music fans. When one of my groups decides on a date/time/place to host a house concert, we run a crowdsourced advertising campaign, targeted at our principle demographic. We usually have a budgetary goal and price the campaign's contributions ("suggested donations") accordingly, coupled with a spiritual (small contributions) or materialistic (larger contributions) perk of some type, maybe a CD or a tee shirt or a pro bono outing with the band. Assuming we hit the campaign goal (and if we don't, we simply cancel the event until a we have a better date/time/place), we know the headcount of the event in advance, get the cash up front to invest in material perks, and know that the attendees will be there for good music and a good time. It's highly efficient and maximally optimizing for me. Another time that performing music is optimism enhancing is when I broadcast my live music performances on the Internet. This costs next to nothing, except a little time commitment. This method tends to not be income generating, but it is a form of niche marketing to the fans of my music groups that sometimes pays dividends later. The main thing is that it takes hardly any investment of time and money, and that pleases me. These are the main two ways in which performing music is optimal for me. Performing music in the mainstream, traditional way of lugging heavy gear to a public music venue that is at best neutral and at worst hostile to musicians can be a real pain in my arse and rarely (but occasionally) yields an optimism dividend. I'll conclude this post with a live video of my band GUPPY EFFECT performing an outdoor festival. I hope you're life is as awesome as you want it to be.
