No—not because it wouldn’t be helpful sometimes, but because it’s very difficult to successfully, knowingly self-deceive in that way, because ridding yourself of the knowledge that you are self deceiving would involve thought Suppression and humans aren’t very good at that. Your insecurity in the belief would shine through to your behavior.
When you identify a reason to behave differently, I think it is better to just attempt to alter behavior via methods other than self-rhetoric such as modifying the environment, habit modification, or trying to exert willpower.
In any case, I think the mood-enhancing sort of optimism about the future isn’t about believing that things will turn out okay, but about having a lower set point for how “okay” things have to turn out in order for you to be happy with the outcome. You can be quite pessimistic epistemically and still have this sort of emotional optimism, in which outcomes are accurately modeled and yet negative outcomes are perceived as less negative, while positive outcomes are perceived as more positive. It’s not that expectations change, but that failure is less painful and success is sweeter … behaviorally, of course, this is difficult to distinguish from an expectation shift. (Anyone want to devise a way?)
I’m not sure how one would go about acquiring this sort of optimism, though. For me, my levels of that sort of optimism seem to be a function of my general health and the absence of chronic external stress—a complex socio-biological thing that can’t necessarily be influenced by memetics alone.
No—not because it wouldn’t be helpful sometimes, but because it’s very difficult to successfully, knowingly self-deceive in that way, because ridding yourself of the knowledge that you are self deceiving would involve thought Suppression and humans aren’t very good at that. Your insecurity in the belief would shine through to your behavior.
When you identify a reason to behave differently, I think it is better to just attempt to alter behavior via methods other than self-rhetoric such as modifying the environment, habit modification, or trying to exert willpower.
In any case, I think the mood-enhancing sort of optimism about the future isn’t about believing that things will turn out okay, but about having a lower set point for how “okay” things have to turn out in order for you to be happy with the outcome. You can be quite pessimistic epistemically and still have this sort of emotional optimism, in which outcomes are accurately modeled and yet negative outcomes are perceived as less negative, while positive outcomes are perceived as more positive. It’s not that expectations change, but that failure is less painful and success is sweeter … behaviorally, of course, this is difficult to distinguish from an expectation shift. (Anyone want to devise a way?)
I’m not sure how one would go about acquiring this sort of optimism, though. For me, my levels of that sort of optimism seem to be a function of my general health and the absence of chronic external stress—a complex socio-biological thing that can’t necessarily be influenced by memetics alone.