I suspect optimism is learned to some extent. Past experiences and outcomes shape your optimism, because it skews your bias.

People who had good things happen and got lucky get more optimistic as that's their experience.

If true, it might be that good genetics and environment gives you exceptional longevity, and also increases your chances of good outcomes at every step of your life which in turn make you an optimist.

Off course, I'd love to believe it's your mindset that affects outcomes, as it would give you control over your destiny, but it's precisely because that truth is so tempting that I'm extra skeptical of it.

This sounds like it should be true, but from life experience, I don't really think it is.

It would be rational for things to work that way, but personalities and emotions are not very rational.

There are some people who seem like they have everything in life going for them, and they're still pessimists, their narrative of the world is petty and ugly, or cruel.

Conversely, there are other people who have suffered tragedies that I might consider literally unbearable (i.e. suicide-worthy), and they are still optimists.

I think these are more fundamental personality traits. You can see it in siblings that grow up in essentially identical conditions, but one has a "sunny disposition" and another is anxious and worried.

Dissatisfying take: It's both true and untrue.

Your mindset absolutely has an influence on outcomes - how you come off to other people influences how they react to you and treat you. How you look at a problem influences whether you decide to engage with it, and how.

This exists in a gradient space - some things are more readily influenced in this way, others are not, a few are (nearly) completely untouched.

Existence, that is - the Universe, is a complex system. We know at least a few things about those:

- they behave in unintuitive ways. Attempting to predict the behavior of a complex system has an inverse relationship with the granularity and specificity of the prediction.

- the behavior of the whole is unrepresentable in the behavior of the constituent parts (you cannot drive an axle to work, unless it is part of a car)

- they are very resilient against attempts at control, but more susceptible to influence

- they can exhibit features like recursion, inertia, and attraction. Each of these has specific consequences for the behavior of the whole.

The relationship between outlook and outcome is bidirectional - one influences the other and vice versa. This structure has a high chance to exhibit recursive reinforcement, which is why I think we're used to seeing very optimistic and very pessimistic outlooks, with not so many 'middle-of-the-road' types. It does provide a lever to push, however, if one has the fortitude to push through the failures on the way to that tipping point.

I shouldn't be here, the first 20 years of my life were essentially every bad thing, defective body, I had my first birthday party at 30, dead parents, stolen and exploited childhood, moving all the time, constant mortality threat, surgery induced aphantasia, waking surgeries scenarios that spiral some adults into ptsd. Long term thwarted desires because I couldn't get health insurance without being a wage slave pre ACA. Co-founded my own succesful company the moment I could get ACA.

I have a brain and as my wife once told me in a moment of frustration.

"You're just happy to be here" and that is true. I didn't ask to be born and I've generally not enjoyed it, I'm only here because random luck geographically and temporarily allowed me to just squeak by surviving childhood and adolescents, I am a few years away from a cardiological surgery I could easily die in.

But, it's all so damn funny isn't it, what an odd thing to be alive, a little cluster of atoms arranged human wise. I hope I die not having achieved what I want to achieve, I hope, like sharks, I never keep moving.

Humans generate meaning, we are the known, empirically observed generators of the mosy complex meaning in existence and we still don't know and haven't created most stuff, it's early days yet. In the meantime, we're part of the entropic cycle, and we emit meaning the way stars emit photons.

People will say we aren't special, but we are, special and rare and should be preserved, dolphins, et all should be too, but let it be observed that it will be humans and not dolphins that deflect asteroids for the foreseeable future.

Many times when things got bad I thought I'd kill myself, I woke up from so many surgeries I started getting disappointed when I'd wake up, but I was too damn curious about what happens next, I can always end it tomorrow, nbd, I look forward to the perma nap, I'm an accident that shouldn't exist and I can exert casual leverage on the world with mere speech.

Who knows what the future holds, let's give dolphins thumbs, let's give silicon rockets to explore the universe, let's engineer long life so we can start worrying about solving entropy instead of whether or not a single spinning rocks "mid air collision" or 5 degree increase in temperature will cause total societal collapse and put an end to our weird little epicenter of meaning generation.

Maybe we solve entropy, maybe we figure out how to change the topology of spacetime, maybe we don't, it's too early to tell.

Optimism is just the headspace to try again, it's not emotional ignorance, it's not positivity, it's the curiosity to keep trying new experiments, and the humility to not be intellectually certain of despair.