I had never heard the term “delusionally optimistic” until three years ago. It was first uttered in my world by the Janmeister, who used it to describe herself.
It came as something of a surprise. I guess I had managed to avoid delusionally optimistic people in the world, certainly the vast majority of my ex-whatevers could never be classified in this manner – delusional yes, optimistic, no.
I do know of many who profess that the glass is either half empty or half full, so this would lead one to believe that half of us are optimistic in the classic sense, while the other half aren’t.
But this simply isn’t so. It turns out that 80% of our society is delusionally optimistic. That means that the glass isn’t just half full, but overflowing.
As you can imagine, this is quite an astonishing discovery, at least to me. Without knowing it, I appear to have ferreted out the 20% out there who are pessimists with razor-like precision. I thought the entire world was filled with them.
In truth, they are a very small minority. Science has proven this to be so, in fact.
A recent study has shown that we as a species have “optimism bias.” We are wired to respond to the world around us by completely ignoring the odds. It’s the reason why we believe that we will be the ones to hit Powerball or in my case, that I can still have my “happily ever after,” though it has escaped me countless times in the past.
This really makes my day, by the way, because at least one, if not two exes, told me that I was a pessimist.
Perhaps I was, about our relationship. But I am happy to report that for once I am proud to be a member of the vast majority. I am delusionally optimistic. I am one of the eight in 10 who are in this world.
So, how did modern science figure all this out? The University College London asked their test subjects to estimate their odds of experiencing 80 different unfavorable events in their life. These ranged from the chance of contracting a certain disease to being the victim of a particular crime.
Each participant ranked their chances. They were then told the truth; the actual probability that each of these things can happen to them. They were they asked to re-rate their own odds.
Nearly 80% of the respondents revised their estimates, but they weren’t in line with reality. In other words, they still believed that that a particular event wouldn’t happen to them, underestimating the chances even though they knew the the real odds. They believed that their luck would hold out and they would not be the ones to become a statistic.
Why does this happen? Why do we still believe in happy ever after even though we just got kicked in the teeth last week by the person we thought we would spend the rest of our lives with?
It turns out that it is all in our head, or to be more precise, the brain. To take a deeper look, researchers did MRIs on each subject. It turns that the delusionally optimistic part of our brain is located in the prefrontal cortex. It lights up like a pinball machine whenever we want information that is more positive than it really is. The greater the difference between what is true and what we thought was true, the more activity that occurs in this region of the brain.
Conversely, the right inferior frontal gyrus responds to discouraging information. It just chugs right along; the level of activity never changing no matter how wrong we are.
Now, one would think that being delusionally optimistic is a very good thing. After all, its absence can cause us to become anxious, depressed or even suicidal. A dark cloud always hangs over our proverbial heads, raining down doom and gloom, even when others are bathed in sunshine.
But there is a definite downside to it all. Being delusionally optimistic can lead you to make bad decisions; very bad decisions. Even with all that data saying the odds are against us, we may just forge ahead anyway, believing that we can either beat the odds or that this time, luck will be on our side and we’ll avoid the consequences.
The more I think about this study and my own life, the more I realize that I am extremely delusional. I don’t know of many others who are as optimistic as I, even though the doom and gloomers tried to convince me I was one of them instead. Few people can skip off in search of happy-ever-after and actually believe that it’s going to be there waiting with a complete stranger, 3,000 miles a way, or make a return trip to Seattle to take a job that wasn’t even a sure thing at the time I got on the plane.
I guess this is a good thing. I’m pretty sure that the powers that be out there in the universe intentionally made us delusionally optimistic for a reason. If we weren’t, we’d never have explored new worlds or sailed off for the unknown, being told that we would fall off the edge of the Earth. We’d never take the chance of dating someone out of our league or leave a good job for one that might be better.
I think it may be the entire reason why we are still around on this big rock we call home. The pessimists would have never left the cave, thinking that this is as good as it gets, that this is the way things should be rather than could be.
And certainly we’d never believe that buttered toast could actually land right side up on the floor. But when it does, we delusional optimists jump for joy, as if we just hit the home run in the final game of the World Series, triumphant that we beat the terrible odds and on this very day, witnessed a miracle – butter-side up toast on our dirty floor.
In the Emerald City getting toasted,
– Robb