Delusional Optimism Is the Most Rational Thing You Can Do

Something strange happens when you’ve faced pain long enough.

Something unexpected.

Something most people haven't discovered because they find a way out before the pain gets through them.

Five days without sleep. Not by choice.

The heart would race in any attempt of relaxation.

Second day in you’re frustrated and eventually freak out. By the third night you begin to question existence.

Long enough you feel a kind of exhaustion where you stop feeling tired.

By the fifth you might just stare at the mirror and smile.

You’ve already accepted you have no control, might as well enjoy the moment.

By then, the mind had entered a different space.

And somewhere in that, something else woke up.

Defiance.

With no hope in front of me, no doctor that cared enough to act, I still kept going.

Kept writing my biggest piece ever. Kept enjoying what I loved doing. Kept showing up for what mattered.

Even though it felt I was slowly dying.

I knew in the end we’d all be dead.

So why not live till then?

As I was walking in the park, something shifted in my being.

The noise of the people around began hushing down.

The pathway turned into this liminal bridge where time had stopped operating.

My mind let go of that usual urgency of what came next.

The weight of this world began releasing from me.

I felt this ethereal lightness in between my eyes.

And in that very moment,

I knew everything was coming together.

Regardless of facing something that said otherwise.

Regardless of living proof I don’t have full control.

I was certain it would.

That feeling wasn’t random.

To fight through the lack of evidence, and still believe, takes a level of delusional optimism most never discover.

Most people fall apart and decide this belief is just an emotional coping mechanism.

That hope without evidence is just another word for denial.

I don’t think it is. I think this gets as deep as biology.

In fact, I would argue this is biologically strategic.

As you’re reading this, your brain is deciding what deserves your attention and what doesn’t.

The Reticular Activating System is one of the filters controlling what information reaches your awareness and what gets discarded.

It lets in what is crucial for survival and what your mind deeply believes is important enough to pay attention to.

Hold a belief strong enough, and your brain begins to prioritize what aligns with that belief.

You’ll begin to notice more information that agrees with that belief and less that disagrees with it.

Essentially, this turns into one of the main drivers of how you see the world.

Meaning it dictates how you perceive struggles. Which action you take under that struggle.

The way you think when an opportunity is in front of you.

Whether you even notice the opportunity itself.

This is selective attention, and it’s unconsciously running in your brain right now.

A delusional optimist sees what’s possible.

A pessimist sees what isn’t.

They both end up finding what they were looking for.

If you believe it’s over. Then it’s over.

You’ll notice more of what agrees with that belief. It’s like a mentally constructed road block.

It can rob you of entire versions of yourself that never got the chance to exist.

The opportunity was always there. This version of you wasn’t capable of seeing it.

“We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us.”

— Andrew Ryan

Belief alone is not what changes the circumstance.

It changes what you do inside it. And what you do inside it decides which path you end up in.

This is much deeper than optimism.

This is the will to power.

The decision to move forward regardless of what gets in the way.

A strong will cannot logically exist if you’ve already convinced yourself you’ll fail.

That is acting in contradiction to your own beliefs. No amount of discipline overrides that.

To do so is to pull against your own nature.

A delusional optimist rarely runs on the fumes of discipline.

The belief itself is enough.

Five nights of no sleep physically destroyed me.

And yet that destruction could never reach what I believed was meant for me.

Even in the days I visibly broke apart from what I could not control.

It was not discipline that said I should live the way I chose to.

It was belief.

Reality has a strange habit of rewarding those who refuse to wait for the evidence.

-Noah