A Panacea for Our Wrath

                        People who incessantly exhibit angriness are often associated with words that hold negative connotations in them; angry people are gloomy, forlorn, emotionally capricious, and most significantly, we sometimes obliviously observe, are saturated with pessimism.  that pessimism, we presume, can chip off people from exuberance and burden them with lackluster, bleak lives-- it simply makes people morose and illogically volatile. Nevertheless, pessimism can serve as a silver bullet, as a panacea for our angriness and most occurring disappointments in our everyday life. The quintessential source of our angriness can be found, I claim, in our profuse, illogical optimism.

                    Many of us have an impeccable image in our minds of how our days and lives should be; we painstakingly paint that meticulous image hoping the realities of our days will match that optimistic projection of hopes. Yet, alas, that is seldom the case. Capitalism's competitive nature requires efficiency, and the attainment of that efficiency requires a plan with which we operate to fulfill our tasks and desires. From arriving to work early to making sure our food is well preserved, we set high expectations of how and where things should be, because, we are told, we can achieve the impossible.

                 We wake up every day to encounter and to be bombarded by ceaseless motivational messages that will knock our desperations with a left hook and our realistic imagination with a brutal uppercut( forgive my silly metaphorical use, I miss boxing..). We are told, by a ubiquitous media platforms and books-- particularly by figures like Anthony Robbins-- that everything will be fine, that if you work hard enough and play by the rules, the skies are the limit; "you are formidable, you possess unbelievable, limitless capacities with which you can shake mountains," our highly optimistic friend will convince us, and of course, we acquiesce. That focused optimistic media influence left us absurdly and profusely optimistic.

 
                    It is without any doubt counterintuitive to claim that the angriest people tend to be the most optimistic. Nevertheless, underneath that infuriated father who vehemently lashed out at his kids for losing his car keys, underneath the incensed woman whose energy was depleted because of her unstoppable cursing for getting stuck in traffic, underneath the aggravated college student whose prolonged hours at the library failed to ace his test, is, invariably, a highly and irrationally optimistic person whom have been led to believe that the harshness of our realities can almost be altered.

 
                      Anger, no doubt, is magically useful if it served its evolutionary job-- to serve as a supportive mechanism to deliver a message to another individual of the wrongness of something. Here is the twist: that wrongness sometimes is almost never malleable. William James, a prominent American Phycologist and a heroic "pessimistic" figure, came with an equation that shed light on the nature of happiness: happiness = reality/ expectation. The reality with its immutable forces is hardly going to change; however, our expectations can certainly be abridged. Pessimists fathomed the nature of the world by utilizing the equation: truncate your expectations, accept the unchangeable realities of the world you live in, and acknowledge your deep imperfection so you can be blessed with a pessimistic, yet, a jubilant life. So in a slightly more pessimistic world, the infuriated father will be calmed after understanding the goofiness and innate reckless traits of children, the incensed woman will be realistically understanding of the uncontrollable traffic, and the aggravated college student will not perceive this disappointment as a cruel, sudden diminishment of his expectations, but as a natural human deficiencies-- because all of them knew, with a healthy pessimism, that we and the world we live in are deeply imperfect, that's why we will do our best, and not expect much..

Vociferously opposing the conventional wisdom, I claim that we live in a foolishly and highly optimistic era that lacks adequate pessimism. A pessimism that ought to remind us of our cerebral and physical capacities' imperfections, and most importantly, remind us that our expectations-- to satisfy our need for happiness-- ought not exceed our realities.

 Angriness

 

  

Author's Note

I do deeply care about your insights and suggestions. Please, be generous enough to pinpoint my failed attempts to deliver my message clearly. Further, I politely ask you to turn a blind eye to my oblivious grammatical mistakes.
Thanking you..

Reviews

[Mustafa Abuhamdeh]

An amazing choice of words, you have a unique way of writing, i hope to achieve it one day, hopefully, keep writing and astonish us even more with your future articles