

There are two ways to avoid becoming a pessimist. We lose our confidence and that turns us into pessimists. At some point we stop believing in ourselves and in others too. Otherwise, we can easily end up believing that nothing is possible. That’s why we need to keep trying new approaches and taking risks. Or maybe the situation was different.īut when it comes to optimism, we should never allow ourselves to accept failure or let expectations dictate our behavior. Maybe the person has changed in another way. But sometimes we can’t pinpoint anything specific. Then we try to figure out where we went wrong. If you have a hunch about someone and then they behave the opposite, or if you predict something to happen but it doesn’t happen, we may experience feelings of disappointment or frustration. You know things could be better but when you assume things will remain the same, how can you ever get excited about making changes?īut here’s the thing – Assumptions don’t hold up under scrutiny. This can happen very quickly and leave us feeling helpless. Because when things turn out differently than expected, we become disappointed and then we fall into despair. That’s right, assumptions are one of the biggest reasons why we get discouraged. It can affect your optimism, even when everything else around you seems perfect.Īll because of one simple thought process: assuming things always stay the same. Everything from what we go through at work, to the weather, to relationships.Īnd this negativity can creep into our minds and influence the way we see things. In fact, most of our day-to-day reality is pretty negative. What happens behind closed doors is usually not that kind of fun. And yet very few of us live up to any of those descriptions. Now to me none of those sound like bad things! They sound like great things. Being able to believe in yourself while knowing how much there is still to learn and discover.

An ability to maintain a belief in ourselves and others despite evidence to the contrary. Seeing possibilities for change and growth. If we talk about optimism, what does it actually involve? I would describe optimism as having a sense of seeing opportunities.
#Adorno quotes on optimism how to
So we want to make sure that we understand what optimism really means and how to be more optimistic so that we can take control of the way we feel about things going forward. It gives us hope and energy and makes us happier. We often say that we are optimistic, and we think that we should be. What do we mean when we use the word? Do we just see something good happening? Or do we have a general outlook on life? When we look at optimistically, what exactly do we mean by this? So let’s start with why we say we are optimistic. We all need both of these qualities at times but we don’t need them every moment of our lives if they aren’t serving us well. You can be positive without being an optimist or pessimistic without being pessimistic. Some people are optimists, some pessimists but a lot of the time it comes down to how you feel. the fact that the narrative-industries of late capitalism are hardly innocent bystanders in the business of accumulation, but play an indispensable role in creating new markets, restructuring old ones, and ceaselessly legitimating, transacting and regulating the sway of the commodity form over society as a whole.The term ‘Optimism’ is used in many different ways. But where deconstruction and post-structuralism promptly sealed off this potentially explosive insight behind the specialized ghettos of linguistics or ontological philosophy, and thus unwittingly perpetuated precisely the authoritarian monopoly over theory authorized by the ontologies in the first place, the most insightful intellectuals of the New Left (most notably, Adorno and Sartre) would insist on the necessarily mediated nature of this dissemination, i.e. & C.” whereas the latter identifies the space of the editing room as a new kind of cultural zone, and thus transforms a certain visual recursion into a protomorphic video library of images, the former concentrates not on the image per se but on the messages and texts transmitted by such-or what Derrida would identify as the thematic of a dissemination which is never quite identical with what is being disseminated.


In many ways, “Free for All” is the logical complement to the visual innovations and luminous mediatic strategies of “A., B. The most direct critique of what might be called the politics-industry of late capitalism, however, is undoubtedly “Free for All”, both the funeral dirge for the national mass party and the unofficial founding charter of the New Left.
