I just began reading a new book. Recommended by Trevor McKendrick in his How It Actually Works newsletter, Learned Optimism is a book by psychologist Martin Seligman about, get this, how to learn to be optimistic. I expect to enjoy it thoroughly and pass it on to the rest of the family. However, within the first two pages, something troubling bubbled up. Seligman cites the pessimistic trait of believing things out of your control are your fault. This surprised me since I've long believed that trusting things are at least partially my fault is a good way to stay grounded and maintain a sense of agency over my circumstances. But there's a nuance to assigning fault in this way, and it has to do with the application of hope. Let me explain.
When I say "It's partially my fault", what I'm doing is shutting off the part of my brain that would otherwise make excuses and dodge accountability. Once that takes place, I'm free to look deep into the series of events more objectively to look for the fork in the road responsible for the problem. But one thing I usually leave out when I explain this to people is my understanding that my decision to choose this path wasn't an error, as such. A different choice at that fork may have avoided the unfortunate event, but this revelation is for educational purposes only. I.e, this is only exercising my ability to recognize my own accountability so I might be able to adjust my behavior later to avoid a similar fate. This transfers a sense of control away from the whims of the universe and hands it back to me. In short, I'm erasing some of the hopelessness associated with my negative experiences.
This is not, however, an exercise to blindly blame myself for my misfortune. This would be inaccurate. Here's a hypothetical example:
I'm a college student and my campus is in a major city. I'm a junior, so I've moved out of the freshman dorms and into an apartment across town. It's about a 15-minute walk, door to door. One day, on the way back from class, I get mugged. This is unfortunate. But using the "my fault" exercise, it has to be my fault, right? But how could that be? I was walking the street I take every day in broad daylight in a safe area of the city, if there could be such a thing. But the purpose of the exercise is to walk back the cause-and-effect timeline, from the specific to the abstract. Specifically, I was on that street because that's the safest route back to my apartment. But abstractly, I was in that city because that's where I chose to go to college. That's the fork. But we can examine back even further. I chose this college because I didn't get accepted into my first choice, which happened to be in a different state on a nicer campus. I spent too much time playing and not enough time working in high school, which led to lower grades and lower skill levels, which led to flubbing my application to the college I wanted. This is all, of course, purely hypothetical. So at the end of this exercise, we find the culprit: playing too many video games in high school caused me to get mugged in college.
The absurdity of these trains of thought is part of the point. Without it, I would skip the exercise every time I felt blameless. But we can convince ourselves of anything to avoid implication, making it unclear who or what was culpable. But consistently thinking in this way opens me up to the possibility that, over time, much of my misfortune is preventable.
Some things are causal but we claim they're misfortune. If I park on a street with a no parking sign, I risk getting a ticket. If there are 5 other cars on the street and I'm the only one to get a ticket, I might think of this as bad luck. But it isn't. The other cars are red herrings. They have no bearing on the facts of the situation. I broke the law and got fined for doing so. Cause and effect.
So what's the difference between the author's description of the pessimistic view (believing everything is my fault) and my thought exercise (to seek out fault in things)? I think the answer lies in the application of the logic. Let's look at another example, one that actually happened to me recently. I ordered something that came with some hardware to assemble it. Nuts and bolts. When I took it out of the box, I noticed the plastic bag holding the hardware had a hole in it. Everything seemed to be there, so I wasn't too worried, but when I went to assemble the thing, one nut was missing. What did I do to cause this? Nothing. That nut is probably sitting on a factory floor somewhere between the bag-filler-upper and the put-the-things-in-the-box machines. Compared to getting mugged, this is nothing. The scale of this unfortunate event is so small it doesn't even warrant further examination. My thought exercise in this case would take 5 seconds and end with "bad luck, old boy." Now, no one in their right mind would believe this is their fault. However, pessimists who, according to the book, tend to believe bad events last a long time, might keep a running list of these events close in their mind, and this tiny stroke of bad luck would be yet another line item they internalize to lord over their outlook on life. By contrast, an optimist might nominate 2 seconds to lament their misfortune and move on to solving the problem with a 7-minute drive to the hardware store.
The ability to sort out the nuances of the unexpected takes practice. Not everything requires deep examination, and as the saying goes, sometimes shit happens. And I think my discomfort with the book's view that optimists "believe things aren't their fault" lies with the definition of "things". Personal conflict, for example, is a thing. And this is where my thought exercise makes most of its money. Sure, if I get mugged I can pretend it was my fault in some way, but I wouldn't ever actually let myself believe that unless my examination revealed a tangible lapse in judgment somewhere. After an argument, however, I better believe I'm partly at fault if I ever want to grow as a person. Or stay married. Again, purely hypothetical.
All the self-blame for unpreventable things is a reliable way for me to stay level and not take bad things too hard. Positivity, a.k.a. optimism, begets good fortune, which begets more positivity. It's cyclical. One could argue that you have to have good fortune to start with, but that outlook is broken. There are only two inputs at work here, attitude and circumstances. And we only have control of one of those.
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