Saturday, May 04, 2013

Reversing the glass analogy

In a common English figure of speech, someone who "thinks the glass is half full" is an optimist, and someone who "thinks the glass is half empty" is a pessimist.

As I've mentioned many times before, I'm a pessimist.  This means I tend to expect things to turn out terribly.  An employer didn't hire me, so I expect that I'll never be able to get a job.  A person was mean to me, so I expect that everyone ever will be mean to me.  I saw a bug, so I expect that everywhere I ever live will be infested.  I can never see any good reason why things wouldn't turn out worst case scenario, so that's what I expect.

However, things don't always turn out as poorly as I expect.  Sometimes I get a job.  Sometimes people are nice to me.  Sometimes there aren't any bugs.  And this always makes me very pleasantly surprised.

I was recently in a conversation where I was talking about something that turned out better than I expected (it was about the joys of adulthood, and how when I was a kid I had no idea that the problems of childhood would go away in adulthood), and an interlocutor said to me "You're really a glass half full person, aren't you?"

My first thought was to deny it because I am intrinsically pessimistic, but then I realized in this particular situation, I was seeing the glass as half full.  But that's only because I was expecting it to be empty.

Meanwhile, my interlocutor's child-self was expecting adulthood to be all glamorous and awesome and it turned out to be mundane.  So they saw the glass as half empty.  But that's only because they were expecting it to be completely full.

Maybe the figure of speech should go the other way around?

1 comment:

Lorraine said...

I always assumed it was meant to be a "yes or no" question.