Last Friday I lost. It was a big night, the Canon Media Awards, a big deal for the print and online publishing industries: premier, prestigious. The kind of night you get a new dress for, perhaps watch what you eat for a week or two prior in order you might forgo the flesh-toned, saddlebag-slimming bicycle shorts. The kind of night where a couple of lucky bastards stagger about under the combined weight of their haul of certificates, trophies and congratulatory kisses, and everyone else walks around assuring each other they were "robbed". It wasn't my night. I was not a winner. And I was okay with that. Twice already a bridesmaid, I was expecting it actually; was, in fact, prepared for worse, for the emcee to announce there'd been a mistake. That not only was I not a winner, but that I shouldn't have even been a finalist. That compared to the calibre of my co-nominees, quite frankly, I sucked. Like, seriously, who did I think I was kidding? And once I had gone there, once I had envisaged the full awfulness of that humiliating, smashed-in-the-gut scenario, I felt quite happy really, free to worry, instead, about what else could go wrong. Free to resolve that at these awards I would be a demure presence, gliding graciously about the room. To promise myself that I would keep a lid on the incendiary, regrettable nonsense to spew forth from my big, gobby mouth in previous years. And that if I had to lose, then I would be generous enough to hope my friends and colleagues might yet triumph, rather than praying we might now all go down in one blazing heap of misery.
After reading this, I imagine you have me pegged as a terrible pessimist, and you are naturally at liberty to draw your own conclusions. However, I would argue there is something to be said for the realism of a considerably more negative approach. Pragmatism, rationalism, equipped whatever the outcome: these are traits to be valued. More reliable, anyway, than the fancifulness of optimism, its very deludedness. More trustworthy, surely, than a permanently sunny disposition. Somehow I've always felt you must be thick, or at least insincere, to consistently expect a positive result when there is patently so much potential for disaster out there.
Of course I have been aware for some time that I am decidedly not on-trend with my glum outlook. Pessimism does not sit well with modern society's reverence of personal fulfillment, our pursuit of happiness at any cost. Recently, however, I have detected a thawing towards optimism's gloomier sister. A begrudging appreciation has been creeping into the discourse. An acknowledgement that pessimism comes in many forms, and may have its uses. As an anxious person I was gratified to read of a study published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences (not my usual bedtime reading) that found those who are defensively pessimistic are unwittingly calling upon a strategy which allows them to work more productively. That by picturing the worst, they are able to focus less on their emotions, thus freeing them up to act more effectively when the time comes.
Which presumably explains why, last Friday, once my losing ambitions had been confirmed, I sent off a flurry of ill-advised texts, knocked back one too many drinks, and hoovered up the last of the petits fours, all while enthusiastically, and ever so slightly out of time, cutting up the rug.
Following on
Others were moved to write in with their thoughts on how to reconcile what we have with what others haven't after last week's column. Bev said last year she travelled through India with her own driver and "saw a woman sweeping the threshold of her home, which was just a few bits of cardboard and wood attached to a similar home. She used her stick broom with much pride." Damian said he has "a heap of sympathy for the less fortunate in other countries ... We are farmers and not much comes easy but the men in New Zealand who think they live in poverty, to me simply don't work hard enough."
