Looking around the world and across the millennia, isn't it amazing how wonder-filled and happy a life that most of us have achieved, most of the time?

Yes, we're finite and imperfect creatures. We witness tragedy and experience it ourselves. Friends die of cancer, are crippled by disease, lose their personalities to senility. The universe seems not to be designed with justice for us in mind. It's cold outside and lonely in here.

Yet we manage, for the most part, to arrange our affairs to produce reasonable comfort. Often we even succeed in making gradual improvements for our later years and for the next generation. Productive society goes on ... in spite of natural disaster ... in spite of violently destructive behavior by disgruntled or fanatical subpopulations ... in spite of shameful misallocation of resources ... and in spite of corruption in politics, business, labor, and just about every other big organization one can name.

Rose and Milton Friedman titled their joint autobiography Two Lucky People — an appropriate self-assessment that applies more widely. We really are incredibly lucky.

So call me Mister Pollyanna — I don't mind. Pollyanna is a pretty interesting book, not "great" but nonetheless thought-provoking and worth reading in the original version. It's by Eleanor H. Porter (~1912), and its eponymous protagonist with her relentless optimism is kind of a neat character to observe. And maybe to emulate ....

(see also OptimistCreed (16 Apr 1999), RememberMe (21 May 1999), My Business (30 May 1999), HumanNature (5 Dec 1999), GoodWill (25 Dec 1999), BennettOnLife (19 Mar 2000), My Religion (6 Nov 2000), ChristmasFaith (23 Dec 2000), UniversalFlourishing (25 Dec 2001), ...)

TopicLife - 2002-12-25

(correlates: SituationalStrategy, SuspectTerrain, JudyReWilderness, ...)