Happy Fun Cog

I'm reading a book about optimism right now, though it might be more accurate to describe the book as a study of optimism versus pessimism. As anyone who as read a few posts in this blog knows, I am a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, so much so that I always spell the phrase as died-in-the-wool. One of the things that I'm learning from this book is the long-term impact of pessimism. In looking at the impact of difficult situations, pessimists regard individual points of failures or short periods of struggle as huge, overarching narratives that represent not, say, the fact that a particular piece of software you're responsible for is a buggy sumbitch, but rather the fact that you're a stupid, fat stinky piece of failure who's fat and who is hated by all and who will die alone and you might as well eat worms because nobody likes you.

I jest, but the fact of the matter is that almost every (work)day for me is a period of time saturated with tension and overshadowed by failure. I am filled with massive amount of resentment towards my co-workers. That there should be some friction between us is understandable because we've worked together for 5 years in some cases and many of those years were intensely chaotic and dysfunctional, marked by high stress and leadership that was either totally absent or totally incompetent. But none of that justifies the lenses of intense negativity through which I regard the people around me.

Someone commented a few posts ago that perhaps I should change the way I oft describe passages of events in this blog because the angry way in which I described things perpetuates the negative perspective, grinds it into the daily fibers. I'm not going to admit that this person is right because, hey, what's the point of being a resentful pessimist if you can't use said qualities to protect one's ego?

But there's a better way to live and write, and maybe one day I'll get there.

Also, you all suck and we're all going to die.