Another New Year, another EDGE Question to meditate upon - hella scientists and smartypants vibing out on a thought-provoking, futuristic theme (see past EDGE posts for 1/05 - 'What do you believe that you can't prove? ', 1/06 - 'What is a dangerous idea?' ), with so many bright bulbs you're guaranteed of finding something to make you go 'hmmmmmm'. This year's question sounds promising-ish, maybe unfashionable: WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?
I am just beginning to skim and will prob blog some greatest hits later, but Gary Jones's post on this has already gotten my personal bloggy juices going with his excerpt from Oliver Morton's answer, which I'll be coming back to for other reasons in a near-future post:
I am not, by default, optimistic; it is an attribute that I take on as a duty more than out of temperament. Left to myself I do not look out at the world and see a hopeful place – and did not do so even when the geopolitical state we are in was not so dreadful. But I have been convinced over the years that an outlook that gives play to hopefulness is by and large a better tool with which to help improve the future than the alternatives. You are more likely to find solutions if you believe they are there than not. The trick for those of us without the sunny state of mind naturally suited to such an outlook is to find objects for our optimism that make the duty feel less dutiful.
My outlook on my life and the world more generally can swing pretty wildly between optimism and pessimism, but I think that I've been in a period of pretty vigorous self-critique when it comes to my personal projects - mostly because, with my brain-work being mostly sequestered in grad school, and my music-work being sequestered in being an unsigned, largely unreleased band, I wasn't really competing with anyone but 'myself', or vague, ultimately self-generated benchmarks. This WILL change in 2007 - Aa releases its debut CD/DVD in early April, and in May I'll be (hopefully) transitioning to my first post-grad school job, which seems way more important, or at least focused, than that first post-undergrad employment. Both of these events will represent the first real-world tests of the two career('career')-projects I've been working on more or less since I started this blog all the fuck the way back in May 2004, and to do well on these tests I will need to seek out opportunities, sell myself, and generally make shit happen.
So, not to be obnoxiously self-centered or anything, but I'm going to choose to be optimistic about MY PROSPECTS in 2007, not for any reason that I can really provide convincing proof of, but because I'm optimistic that an optimistic attitude will help me succeed 'out there'. Updates to follow throughout the year, unless things go rly badly, in which case we'll just forget this post ever happened -