If you are looking for reasons to despair, you just have to take a look at the news: Notre-Dame is destroyed, the economy is in a downturn, a new wave of populism is looming, Brexit becomes an eternal hang-out, and the press photo of the year shows a crying Girl at the US border.
How does one endure this flood of bad news without becoming depressive or cynical? Where is the positive?
We need some kind of confidence. Without a minimum of positive future expectations, no one would design political programs, give birth to children, travel or even get up in the morning.
Easter is not what it once was
Confidence is in crisis, especially in Germany. Although - or because of - their standard of living is high, German young people are more pessimistic about the future than their peers in Mexico, Nigeria or Kenya. Even Easter, the church festival of confidence, is no longer what it used to be: Believing in the resurrection is hard for even believing Christians today. And the churches are in such a dire need of self-confidence rather than donation.
Apparently, we are currently not only experiencing a fossil but also a psychological energy crisis: What we most miss about the future is the driving energy of confidence and thus the basic fuel of life. This does not mean the naive hope that in the end everything will be fine. The so-called "positive thinking" can even be counterproductive at this point.
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What it needs at the moment is not a pink optimism, but a disillusioned attitude that will not discourage you despite all the problems. The best word for this is the ancient term "confidence". The Old High German "Zuoversiht" originally described only the "anticipation of the future", no matter whether it seemed good or bad. Only in the course of time was the term charged with the expectation of what one wishes. To this day, there is a mellow sound in confidence that is completely foreign to cheerful optimists.
What we can learn from Greta Thunberg
The best example of this is Greta Thunberg, who is currently campaigning for the climate. Although she spreads confidence, she is not an optimist. She sees the state of the planet illusionless and her commitment does not depend on whether it leads to success or not. When she first struck for the climate in August 2018 in front of the Swedish Reichstag, she did not expect anything special, she recently told Anne Will. She did not want to start a movement. "I just wanted to do everything in my power to draw attention to the climate crisis."
So your actions are not driven by the hope of a good outcome, but by the conviction that it is right to be so committed. Asked if she was not worried that her mission would fail, she calmly replies, "I have no mission, my goal is simply to do everything I can to make the earth a better place."
The Czech human rights activist Vaclav Havel once said in a nutshell this kind of inner strength: "Hope is not the conviction that something is going well, but the certainty that something makes sense, no matter how it ends."
The parable of the three frogs
Especially in difficult situations where success seems almost hopeless, this reliance on the meaningfulness of one's own actions is the only way not to sink into despair. Catchily, this illustrates the famous parable of the three frogs falling into a pot of cream. "Oh dear, we are lost," groans the first frog pessimistically and drowns. The optimist, on the other hand, believes, "Do not worry, somebody will save us." He waits and waits and drowns as well. The confident frog says: "There's nothing left for me to do." He cranks his head over the surface and struggles - until the cream turns to butter and he jumps out of the pot.
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Confidence therefore means recognizing the seriousness of the situation and at the same time making use of the leeway that opens up.
The astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018, also had every reason to despair: in his early twenties he was diagnosed with the incurable nervous disease ALS, and gradually he lost control of his muscles until he was completely paralyzed. But instead of sinking into self-pity, Hawking - like the frog in the cream - found the leeway that made sense of his life: he designed cosmological theories, married his girlfriend Jane and wrote "A Brief History of Time" that became a World Orderer. "In my opinion," Hawking said in the 2011 New York Times, "disabled people should focus on the things they can, rather than mourn those they can not." A clever motto that would save other people a lot of suffering.
Stable in the face of resistance
Those who only keep an eye on external success are easily frustrated if things do not go as hoped. Those who follow their inner convictions remain stable in the face of resistance. If Greta Thunberg had thought only of her chances of success, she probably never would have started her school strike.
How important this inner alignment is, studies also prove. Thus, the economists Manju Puri and David Robinson have evaluated the data of the American Survey of Consumer Finances. In this survey, US citizens regularly answer questions about income, saving and consumption habits, health behavior and attitudes. It turned out that: Positive people usually work longer, save more, smoke less, pay more attention to their health and dare to marry after a divorce - which all leads to a higher probability of career success, marital bliss and have a long life.
However, this only applies to people who call Puri and Robinson "moderate optimists" - those who also have a great sense of reality. In the case of the "extreme optimists", who are convinced of their success from the outset, the effect is reversed: they work less, smoke more, invest their money only for a short time, or rather spend it outright - in the over-optimistic belief that they can nothing will happen. With optimism, concludes Puri and Robinson, it's like red wine: "A glass a day is healthy, but a bottle a day can be fatal."
Confirmation for confident or illiterate?
Even medical examinations show the effect of confidence. This is most evident in the famous placebo effect: those who are more likely to seek a cure, unconsciously activate self-healing powers that actually help in coping with illnesses. Such studies repeatedly prove the astonishing power of the "self-fulfilling prophecy": Those who confidently tackle problems unconsciously create the prerequisites for coping with them - while the pessimistic attitude "That does not mean anything anyway" unerringly creates the basis for negative experiences , Curiously enough, in the end, everyone may feel confirmed in their world view, the confident like the illiterate.
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Ulrich beak
Confidence: The power of inner freedom and why it is more important today than ever
Publishing company:
Karl Blessing Verlag
Pages:
256
Price:
EUR 22,00
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At the same time, these findings raise the interesting question of what is actually a "realistic" behavior in relation to the future. For realism today is the measure of all things in the knowledge society. What is considered "unrealistic" is usually off the table, is labeled as ridiculous or esoteric.
But with the much-vaunted realism, based only on proven facts, that is one thing: everything that is proven refers only to past developments, never to future ones. In addition, the realist can only include those facts in his calculus that are aware of him and can be clearly named. What he misses are the seemingly trivial details and vague moods that can surprisingly turn out to be the formative forces of the future. Therefore, even the greatest realists are often so terribly wrong in the assessment of the new: the experts saw the fall of the Berlin Wall just as little as the financial crisis, the Brexit or the election victory of a narcissistic tailor named Donald Trump.
And who would have thought that a sixteen-year-old student from nothing would initiate a global protest movement that today puts even the established policy in train constraint? Seen in this way, realism actually means: always counting on the unexpected; and realize that the future is never fixed, but depends on what we expect from it, what we are prepared for, and how we act today.