IMAGINE standing at the precipice of a tall cliff. Looking down, you can see clear, blue waters reaching up to you with a beckoning motion. In the swirling waters, you can see the promise of an extraordinary memory: the thrill of soft coolness enveloping you after the rush of plummeting down a cliff with nothing but optimistic faith tucked away in your heart. So, you leap. Moments before you reach the water, you realise something. The water is going to be neither soft nor cool. You see, right under the blue waves, a crooked row of jagged rocks grinning at you. The water’s beauty has betrayed you. You trusted it unwittingly, and so will dozens of people standing at the very cliff you leapt from.
Life often carries unwarranted betrayal in its most beautiful moments. Sometimes, you are called to have faith in its beauty and are rewarded with hardship or grief. The trust you have in the world is chipped away in moments like these, and the next time you face a door, you are less likely to believe there are beautiful things behind it. As we continue to grow, we may eventually lose all of our optimism and begin to approach life with a general feeling of contempt and distrust.
Oftentimes, in today’s world, when we recognise beauty, we are afraid to reciprocate it, or even to accept it in the first place. We feel the warmth of a smile and wonder what is hidden behind it. We receive the gift of a compliment and worry about what is expected in return. When we experience kindness, we also experience an unconquerable urge to tap on it to check for hollowness. All the beautiful things in the world become tainted by one poor experience, and we let distrust guide our every choice until it becomes an instinct.
Long before we were sophisticated creatures living in a world like this one, we survived purely on instinct. We depended on past memories of mishaps or pain to decide what to do next. When our survival was at stake, it didn’t matter whether our choices brought joy or pleasure; it did matter whether they would harm us. This meant our brains needed to store memories of pain or unpleasantness more deeply and impactfully than they stored pleasure or happiness. So, even if you found yourself in a field of the most gorgeous, fragrant flowers, you would remember being stung by a bee in a field of flowers, and you would feel an incessant need to leave as soon as possible.
Of course, as we have evolved, survival is not the only goal of our lives, and such instincts are no longer useful. However, part of us still functions the same way, creating a phenomenon psychologists call the “Negativity Bias”. Negativity bias describes our natural tendency to remember negative experiences and feelings more strongly than positive ones. Often, this means that even if we had a beautiful day, we might remember a minor accident or inconvenience we experienced for a few minutes more intensely than the warm happiness we felt for the rest of the day. So, when what we had was a bad moment, we trick ourselves into believing we had a bad day.
In an era when survival was key, the “Negativity Bias” would have been a useful way to perceive the world. Now, however, it limits our happiness and what we can achieve.
Beauty might occasionally betray us. Life may disappoint us time and again. Yet we may also encounter marvellous surprises. Sometimes, when we take a leap of faith, what awaits us is not a row of jagged rocks, but a whole new extraordinary world. Being willing to try again will not always lead to the same failure or the same poor experiences. Optimism is not the same as naïveté.
