Give me a little light, with all of that dark

What’s the best way to approach a rational view of life? Things certainly are pretty bad in many respects. The past 7 years haven’t improved my optimistic side. Do we simply become derisive of hopes or dreams? Does cynicism become the badge of rational, reasonable, logical people? In every fluffy, shady cloud, should we look for the hidden hurricane?

We know it’s there. You could say that such outlooks are indeed a mark of reason. We have learned from our lifetimes’ experience in a world full of religious fanatics, selling various versions of eternal Happy Days, that the better it sounds, the worse it often is. The more effort you invest in studying our evolved human nature, certainty increases that life is full of lies and deceit. It definitely is. Every person you have ever come into contact with has their individual agenda and it may or may not overlap with yours. Mostly, it doesn’t.

Few groups of people are likely to be as aware of this as atheists. Once you break down Homo sapiens’ Original Sin of bullshit (the creation of myths) then everything else is reasonably suspect. After all, everything is controlled by these superstitious cuckoos.

But I will maintain that the more confident you are in your rational worldview, the more you free yourself to allow some reasonable hope. I can be extremely negative, but if I abandoned all hope I would cash in my chips. Hope still needs to be closely monitored. You still have to look the situation over and apprise yourself of the downsides involved and always be ready for disappointment. Many times we will be frustrated, but the edge will be taken off it with the knowledge that we had it figured out and buffered ourselves – unlike those who had bought in with all of their cherished emotional savings.

We can live in a world of complete negativity, but that’s also a dangerous strategy for person of reason. You will never have the opportunity of enjoying a truly good thing, right in the moment of it happening. Worse, we have evolved to draw together in moments of positivism and to repel from the negative. In a simply logical sense, the negativity is probably going to get you closer to the facts of any given situation. But we are a social animal. If you chase off all the other beasts of your species, you have a difficult time passing on your genes.

And, after all, that’s what we’re here for. For those reading here who have no children and don’t intend to – you aren’t exempt. Evolution accounts for you too. Your job is to facilitate the continuation of your genes in others. Some of those genes will be extremely close to your own; others more distant, but still related. We really are all brothers and sisters and not in any religious sense.

Don’t put on blinders, but a nice pair of stylish shades can go a long way in helping you to do your genetic duty, with a little panache, before you punch your ticket out of here.