The cynic

I’m not a very nice person. I won’t bore you with a list of all my flaws but at the very least I’m selfish, inattentive, disinterested and impatient*. However, as distasteful as those traits may be, my main character flaw is something far worse: I repeatedly express views that do nothing but to enforce negativity, and encourage destructive behaviour, both in myself and those around me. Yes, it’s true – I’m a cynic.

In the beginning, there was sarcasm

It all started so innocently. A funny remark here, a sarcastic comment there. And more often than not, those remarks were welcomed and appreciated. People were entertained. I seemed vaguely intelligent. It was a win-win.

“No, I mean every word…”

But, as time went by, I started to notice something. My view of the world changed, slowly morphing from a sense of optimism and progression to one of pessimism and stasis. It all happened very gradually, so gradually in fact that over the cause of several decades I didn’t even notice the change at all. Until one day I suddenly sat up and realised the world I observed around me was not the world I had grown up in. What I now saw was a depressive dystopian world, ruled by selfish greedy people doing all they could to stop progress and enlightenment.

Realisation

This insight was quite the alarm bell. I was shocked to realise what I’ve become. That didn’t seem like the world I remembered. It’s not who I am. Although no fan of humanity, I still consider most of the people on the planet vaguely good-hearted. Or at least not explicitly evil. Lazy, without a doubt. And stupid, mostly by choice. But somehow still governed by a sense of fairness and empathy.

Empathy.

So, I was faced with the challenge of finding a way back to the core of my personality, to get back to the person I once was. After all, being a cynic is just a hairline distance away from being a pessimist. And we all know what happens to pessimists: they die; ahead of time, unnecessarily and often quite horribly.

Countermeasure

The task was however a daunting one. What to do? How to change such an ingrained pattern of behaviour? And I didn’t want to completely give up on my way to handle the world. After all, I see things. I observe patterns. I think. This has led to rather unflattering views on politics, religion and economics and our society as a whole, that I believe aren’t completely false or inaccurate.

I might need to re-watch Yes man.

An there is another side to cynicism. It’s also a sort of self-defense, a first-line fortification against the constant onslaught of horrific news that no one can escape nowadays. Cynicism can therefore be considered a side effect of being overly sensitive, or over-empathic (something I touched upon in the post Compassion). I’m sarcastic, because I feel.

In the end, I decided that the best way forward was to focus on the bright spots. Embrace what seemed positive. A medical breakthrough here. A treaty for a cease-fire there. And try to keep my sarcastic, pessimistic and cynical views to myself if I fail to see a bright side. No more “I told you so” or “what can you expect?”.

The future

Being a cynic is about taking cheap shots. It’s about stating the obvious, emphasising the negative. It’s just intellectually lazy and it will never offer any constructive advice on how to improve things, only try to keep them as they are.

But I must try. I must.

Cynicism has never changed anything. And this world really really need to change. I would rather be part of the solution than one of those by the roadside complaining about how things will never change. Things never will, left to their own devices. We will have to roll up our sleeves and change it for them.

   

* I guess I could also add anti-social to that list, although I don’t really consider it a fault. In my mind, withdrawing from being social is underrated, and I believe being overly social is as much an abnormality as being anti-social. But that’ll most likely another post…