the color of happiness…

With a bit of luck and humor, each of us has at least one pair of glasses with pink lenses in his/her wardrobe. Ideal would be to have two pairs in case you often match your purse with the color of your shoes, or you are the happy owner of a blonde secretary with intense and assumed concupiscence that you have to calm down on the full moon nights. 🙂

Glasses with pink lenses help us see life in pink shades. However, when we dare to put down these glasses, real life gets different nuances from the full spectrum of visible light, even from the hidden, invisible light.

But that requires courage.

When you discover that the glasses (the illusion) on your nose are “liars,” you are implacably confronted with the anxiety of death or helplessness, misery or smallness, sickness or aging. When we take off the glasses we become realistic, that is, vulnerable. It’s the moment when we become aware of our fragility and precariousness in front of reality and nature. It isn’t advisable at all to give up the pink lenses through which we see the world, not even to put our glasses down. Only sometimes it is desirable to take a realistic look over them. To be tangent with reality implies an unaltered position that we only reach if we use reason to avoid perceptive and cognitive bias as much as possible.

The glasses with pink lenses are the positive illusions needed as adaptive mechanisms in an insecure and unpredictable world. Realism and the absence of pink lenses represent the depressed position with a high risk of suicide.

Pink lenses make the world more beautiful and life easier to live and therefore can increase happiness and well-being. Healthy people have at least one pair of such glasses.

If you are the owner of such glasses, consider yourself lucky at the “cortical lottery”. There seems to be a genetic determination on the pink lenses.

So some of us are luckier and benefit from lenses with pink shades, and less fortunate people have received lenses with pale pink shades. There are also the unfortunate ones in the “lenses cortical lottery”, who are struggling with severe depression or manic-depressive syndrome.

The lenses of the glasses are colored in pink by the following three illusions:

– The self is amplified positively. In relation to your own self, you perceive yourself as important, beautiful, competent and other positive attributes.

– The illusion that you have control over the environment. In relation to the world, you feel in control, that you have the freedom and the power to change or act on the environment to fulfill your desires.

– Unrealistic optimism in relation to the future. When you imagine your future, you have an unrealistic optimist perspective, living in the emotional register as joy and trust – you think everything will be fine.

Why are they illusions to us? Because our glasses are altering reality, it colors it with pink shades, even if they apply a bit of gray every now and then. Naturally, the reality is unpredictable and indifferent to our prayers, desires, and actions. And the future is still unwritten.

Reality does not support anyone’s side. Reality doesn’t favor anyone as a result of a plan because there are no plans and goals (unless you imagine the presence of a divine entity orchestrating the universe). Reality is spontaneous. But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless. We have control over our actions, but not over the results; which may be desirable or expected only in terms of probability.

In this “insensitive and indifferent” reality, we can be our own artists who paint our own world and our own character in pink shades, or we can be our own narrator and novelist who writes his/her personal history with humor. But do not forget, to take a look at reality over your glasses with pink lenses from time to time just to balance your wheels.

***

Taylor, Shelley E. (1989). Positive Illusions. Creative Self-Deception and The Healthy Mind. Basic Books, New York

Author: mydoina

Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside, awakes. -Carl Gustav Jung- View all posts by mydoina