In 2015, I took a history course under Ambeth Ocampo, the foremost expert on Filipino national hero Jose Rizal.
As one of our requirements, he asked the class to write a paper about the day we were born by browsing through the newspapers published on the day of our birth. In the Old Rizal Library in Ateneo, there’s a microfilm section, where you can look through archives of old newspapers.
So what was in Philippine newspapers on November 17, 1996?
The Philippines hosted the APEC that year, and preparations for which caused us to overlook things, like a large-scale pork barrel scandal and negotiations with the Moro-Islamic Liberation Front. Funny enough, when I was writing that paper in 2015, we were also hosting the APEC and were witness to another pork barrel scandal. Things did not look promising.
Interestingly, page 36 of that day’s issue of the Philippine Star is a section called “The Good News (From Abra to Zamboanga).” Under it, reports of free medical assistance, a government-sponsored management-training seminar, a Regional Trial Court designated as a special crime court — a crumb trail of optimism from around the country.
Just this one page of good news. The rest, as the title implies, must be bad news.
There’s a clear lesson to be learned from this exercise:
Whether it’s 20 years ago, 5 years ago, a year ago, or even today, things haven’t been spectacular, to say the least. And that the good news is but a page in a full day’s headlines.
It’s a rather bleak lesson, but it’s an important one.
It is only in this bleakness that we are pleasantly surprised by ordinary goodness, and this is the real value of pessimism.
Pessimism is knowing you’re going to lose, if not today, tomorrow. And it’s in willingly accepting this that we find happiness in the daily.
False optimism tells us that we begin each day with a number of points, and we gain or lose points as we go through the day. This is a recipe for disappointment, because on bad days, which will come frequently, we will have felt cheated.
On the other hand, a healthy dose of pessimism tells us, we start the day not from positive, not even from zero, but from negative. A much steadier grip on reality.
If you’ve seen the film Shawshank Redemption, then you know that “hope is a dangerous thing. It can drive a man insane.”
This is true. However, this understanding of hope points to expectations and over-estimations. False optimism.
It’s the kind of hope that thinks nothing can go wrong today, everything will go as planned or with only a few bumps on the road. But at the end of the day, this is the same hope that leaves us angry and disappointed as reality sets in.
When pushed to its limits, it is also the hope that leads us to the question, “if life is so bad, then what’s the point? What’s the point of trying?”
To this, I defer to the best pessimist I know of, author and psychologist Jordan Peterson:
“There are some games you don’t get to play unless you’re all in. And [what is] so interesting about being alive is that you’re all in. No matter what you do, you’re all in. This is gonna kill you. So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while you’re waiting. Because do you have anything better to do? Really? Why not pick the best thing possible that you can do? Why not do that? Maybe you can justify your wretched existence to yourself that way. I think you could. That’s what it looks like.”
This leads us to the other side of hope.
As quoted from the same movie, “hope is a good thing, maybe the best of the things. And no good thing ever dies.” This is also true. And this is the type of hope that has no expectations. Why? Because here, “no good thing ever dies,” and expectations do, on a daily basis.
This is real hope. It’s the hope that has no pretensions, and one that reveals itself from a place of real despair. As opposed to its counterpart, from this dark place, it asks, “what have I got to lose?”
The answer to this, of course, is nothing. When beginning from negative, there is only everything to gain. It is precisely because we are pessimistic that we are moved to work to make things better.
And in the game we get to play everyday, the pessimist deploys beginner’s luck.
Beginners come from a place of humility, and they don’t expect to play the game right, let alone win. But this is exactly how beginner’s luck works.
The best games we play are quite often the games we don’t expect to win; winning was never the end goal.
Rather, a beginner plays to learn, to fail, to take risks, and for the chance to simply play the game. The best games aren’t necessarily the games we win, but the games we get to keep playing.
It is not reality that knocks us down but our expectations, which reality can’t possibly live up to.
Just play. Play your best game, with your best beginner’s mindset.
And just maybe, we’ll end up with more good news than we started with.
References / Further listening: