Thank you, Mahesh Sonawane, for this very important question! It is one I often struggle with myself (hence my taking far too long to come up with this answer – sorry!), and I will not pretend to have a definitive recipe for optimism for you. However, I hope this can at least help.
Something I noticed about this question is the form in which it is commonly asked – the way you asked it as well. You asked, “how can we stay positive?”. Apparently, you feel like you should be positive, even if you are unsure how to achieve it. I myself feel the same way, and I think that this tension is fundamental to the problem. We feel a responsibility to be positive, but we have trouble fulfilling that responsibility.
But is that not rather odd? After all, as your question points out, there is much suffering in the world. The normal, rational response to suffering is sadness, not optimism. So why do I still feel like I ought not to be sad?
When would ‘not being sad’ be a sensible reaction to the state of the world? Well, if the world were good, of course. The sensible reaction to good things is feeling good.
And I think that is what we overlook when we struggle with this problem. Even though there is much suffering in the world, there is a lot of beauty, joy, and goodness too. It is common sense that those things make us happy, optimistic, and positive. Equally, it is common sense for the world’s suffering to make us feel sad, pessimistic, and negative.
Now, some people have argued – in many different forms – that there is more suffering than joy in life, or at least in a normal life, and that this joy cannot compensate for the suffering. In the absence of any reliable and objective way of measuring either joy or suffering, we could argue about whether that is true until the world ends. But I think that even starting that discussion is going at it wrong.
It is treating joy and suffering like income and expenses in the accounts-book of a human life. It pretends that they can cancel each other out and leave us with either a profit or a loss. But that is not really how we usually experience joy or sadness, is it? When I feel sad, I cannot spend the happiness of last week’s holiday to make it go away. I cannot even go and do something right now that would normally “make me happy”, because when I am feeling sad it would not have the same effect on me. I am just going to have to deal with being sad for a few weeks. So we cannot settle an account of joy versus sadness in our lives, but have to react to each of those separately, as they happen to us.
So, to sum up, it is sensible to react to suffering with sadness, just as it is sensible to react to good things with joy. How can we feel positive, when there is so much suffering in the world? By focussing on the good things that exist alongside suffering, and feeling the joy that they bring us.
What do you think? How do you stay positive? Let us know in the comments.
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Image: Wheatfield with Crows, Vincent van Gogh (1890)
I am studying for a Master’s degree in Legal and Political Philosophy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. I am mainly interested in existentialist ethics and politics. My favourite philosophical work is The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir, where she advances the idea that human beings are characterised as individuals by the projects they undertake.