Massimo Pigliucci

And so the idea is to try and make progress.

And, of course, you're going to slip back because you're a human being.

You're going to make mistakes.

It's okay.

The right thing to do with mistakes is not to beat yourself up for it because you made the mistake.

There is nothing you can do at this point.

The only thing you can do is to learn from it and then get back up and resume your path.

Okay.

Yes, with a major caveat, however.

So we're not talking just about straightforward optimism, you know, think positively kind of thing, which you hear a lot these days.

Well, sometimes it's not rational to think positively.

There are certain things that are actual problems, and some of these problems are, in fact, impossible to overcome or very, very difficult to overcome, in which case just to think positively about it ends up being a way long-term to blame the victim because, oh, you didn't think positively enough, and that's why that happened to you.

But what Marcus is doing there is, at an intuitive level, anticipating discoveries in 20th century and 21st century psychology.

It is true that exercises in gratitude are good for you.

That is, they actually do something positive, something helpful to your own psyche.

And what they do is they remind you because it's too easy, especially these days, to open up your Internet browser or your newspaper or listen to the radio and be flooded with all sorts of negative, really seriously bad stuff.

So it's easy to fall into despair, you know, the famous doom-scrolling kind of attitude.

Reminding yourself that there are actual people around you that you actually know personally that are trying to do their best.

They are, in fact, they have characteristics, you know, character traits, virtues, as the Stoics would call them.

that are positive and you can emulate, you can set them in front of yourself as an example of how to live or live better, I mean, that is, in fact, a counter to all of this negative stuff that comes in.