Let’s Bring a Tough-Minded Optimism to 2025

Being able to think optimistically while also being grounded in reality requires a significant amount of mental toughness. Biba Kayewich

Many Americans have taken a bit of a beating in the last five years.

The COVID pandemic closed schools, churches, and businesses; widened our nation’s political divides; and left many people distrustful of the government and corporate media. Inflation delivered soaring costs of food, housing, and other goods; increased interest rates; and hit lower-income consumers hard in the wallet. The culture wars, centered around race and gender, raged unabated through these hard times.

It’s little wonder that a 2024 national poll found that 60 percent of Americans believe the country was headed in the wrong direction, with only 30 percent disagreeing.

Keeping a positive spirit can be tough when you’re paying more for rent, gas, butter, and milk. Add in the usual travails and calamities of living, and one’s mood can become as anemic as a rainy winter afternoon.

But there are reasons and ways for repelling pessimism and choosing a brighter path instead.

Keep on the Sunny Side

Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side Keep on the sunny side of life It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way If we keep on the sunny side of life

Apparently, there’s some wisdom to be found in this refrain from an old Gospel hymn and country song. A National Institutes of Health study reports that: “Optimistic people present a higher quality of life compared to those with low levels of optimism or even pessimists.” This is partly because optimism promotes a healthy lifestyle “associated with greater flexibility, problem-solving capacity, and a more efficient elaboration of negative information.”

In “Cheer up! Optimists live longer,” David Shultz cites several three-decade-long studies that show that the most optimistic men and women lived 10 to 14 percent longer than their pessimistic peers. Researchers speculate that the optimistic gang likely follow healthier lifestyles and “also handle stress better than pessimists, choosing to pursue long-term goals rather than immediate rewards when faced with a challenging situation.”

Shultz concludes, “Even if you’re a negative Nellie, take heart: Pessimists can learn to become more optimistic with proper guidance, previous research has shown.”

Accentuate the Positive

Jamie Birt’s “23 Strategies to Become More Optimistic” not only offers great advice on building up that positive spirit endorsed by Shultz, but also links readers to even more tips on avoiding negativity.

Suggestions like “Keep a gratitude journal,” “Limit your consumption of the news,” and “Begin your day with positive expectations” can help nudge us away from gloom-and-doom thinking toward a spirit of positivity.

When the Going Gets Tough

Some people mock optimists as foolish sentimentalists who perpetually find the silver lining in a storm cloud. Dreamers of that sort doubtless exist, but the positive thinkers I’ve known are different creatures altogether, what Patty J. Eschliman calls “tough-minded optimists.”

Drawing on Alan McGinnis’s now out-of-print book “The Power of Optimism,” Eschliman provides readers with an excellent look at what it means to be an optimist grounded in reality. Tough-minded optimists don’t let perfectionism become an obstacle to getting a job done. They are “cheerful even when they can’t be happy,” meaning they can choose to find the good in a situation. They allow for regular renewal of their inner resources, taking R&R time away from obligations and work to enjoy their family and friends. They believe they have some control over their future, yet wisely accept the situations they can’t change.

A good example of this last point can be taken from the daily news. Some people, both progressives and conservatives, are eaten up inside by the news—when in fact, there’s rarely anything at all they can do about it. Inflation, an overseas war, some horrible policy handed down by our lawmakers—we can complain, but making changes is beyond our power, outside of a voting booth.

Tough-minded optimists hope for the best from these distant affairs, but they focus their energy and efforts on the tasks at hand.

American Pessimism Is a Contradiction in Terms

Several years ago, a priest celebrating daily Mass delivered a homily that has stuck with me ever since. A burly, shaven-headed former chaplain in the Marine Corps, he stepped to the lectern, looked around the church at the congregants, then said, “You’re all made in the image and likeness of God. Act like it.” End of homily.

Change a few words in that slap-to-the-head, two-sentence sermon, and we have this: “You’re all Americans. Start acting like it.”

Pessimism was never a part of the American creed. For over two centuries, in fact, Europeans poked fun at us for what they saw as our naivety and starry-eyed idealism. Yet we were the can-do country, the people who dreamed big, who built skyscrapers, conquered horrible diseases, introduced machines and technology that changed the world, and sent the first men to the moon.

These days, we hear much from doom-mongers and ideologues about the flaws and limits of America. To them, and to all such people, Eschliman has this to say: “Tough-minded optimists interrupt their negative trains of thought. ... Continuous put-downs do nothing to increase the confidence of success.” She then asks, “Do you unintentionally catastrophize things by using words like ‘always’ and ‘never’? Do you tend to jump to worst case scenarios?”

For far too long, many in our political arena, our media, and the general public would have to answer yes to those questions. The pessimism they’ve embraced is a guarantor of defeat and failure. They’re like a high school football coach who tells his team before a big game, “Well, boys, they’ll be walking all over you today. Just stay out of the way and try not to get hurt.”

A new year is a time of possibilities, hope for the future, and change for the better. This year, let’s step into that future like Americans: tough-minded optimists buoyed up by the belief that we can meet and solve whatever challenges come our way.