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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| A neutron walks into a bar. "What'll it be?" asks the bartender. "How much for a beer?" "For you, no charge!" While this Quartz article is from the faraway year of 2017, I found enough to snark on to make it worth sharing. You’ve likely been asked how you see the proverbial glass: half full or half empty? Your answer allegedly reflects your attitude about life—if you see it half full, you’re optimistic, and if you see it half empty, you’re pessimistic. I'm an engineer. All I see is an overdesigned glass. Or, depending on my mood, an inefficient use of available storage space. I'm also a pessimist, but at least I'm a pragmatic one. Implied in this axiom is the superiority of optimism. Also, I don't know if even the most dedicated pessimist, not knowing and deliberately following this particular cliché, would seriously consider "half-empty" to be a thing. Almost everything is related to full. Like, if your fuel gauge is in the middle, you say "we have half a tank of gas," not "the tank's half-empty." Thus, the good answer is to see the glass half full. Otherwise, you risk revealing a bad attitude. Shut the fuck up about my attitude. Actually, the glass isn’t half full or half empty. It’s both, or neither. Come on now. No. It's not in a state of quantum indeterminacy. Or, at least, no more than any other object in view. Things aren’t mutually exclusive, awesome or awful. Mostly they’re both, and if we poke around our thoughts and feelings, we can see multiple angles. On that bit, though, I'm fully on board. I really hate it when people put things into two boxes: "awesome" and "suck." The moment Netflix went to shit was the moment it switched from star ratings to thumbs up or down. Of course, I'm fully aware that by hating it, I'm putting the idea of the awesome/suck binary into the "suck" box. Everyone is a hypocrite, including me. Neutrality sets us free. It helps us see something more like the truth, what’s happening, instead of experiencing circumstances in relation to expectations and desires. Ehhhh... nah. Pessimism, and only pessimism, sets us free. An optimist is doubly disappointed when their imaginings fail to materialize: from the positive outcome having not worked out, as well as the ego hit from being wrong. A neutral person risks never experiencing the joy of anticipation. It is only the pessimist who, if their prediction falls flat, still takes a win: either something good happens, which is good; or they turn out to be right, which is a pleasant feeling. The article goes on to relate the quality of neutrality to Buddhism, I suppose in an effort to give neutrality some ancient gravitas, but instead, it only makes Buddhism seem even less appealing to me. But hey, it's not about me. On the subject of whether this applies to anyone else or not, well, I'm neutral. |
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