Pretend You're Happy And Live Longer

“We have observed that when people are negative about past events in their life, they also have a pessimist or fatalistic attitude towards current events. This generates greater problems in their relationships and these people present worse quality of life indicators.”
 — University of Granada researcher Cristián Oyanadel discusses a study showing that a negative outlook on life causes health problems and depression, which doesn’t surprise me one bit, because when you think about life — that endless procession of sorrow and despair and false hope and wasted effort, the way we inexplicably raise ourselves up in the morning to put ourselves through another day of boredom at best, tragedy if we’re less lucky, all for a bunch of useless trinkets that can never really keep us from forgetting the fact that at the end we, and everyone we have somehow convinced ourselves we care for, will die, often in painful and preventable ways, and all the suffering we have undergone since we were very small until that last day of our existence will have been for nothing but to serve the collection of chemicals that keeps us together and eventually puts us in the ground — it makes perfect sense that the simple acknowledgment of its cruelties would in fact make it even more brutal. Also, I don’t feel so good.