Tomorrow is another day

[robinturner]

Don't you just hate tautologies like that?

I really don't want tomorrow to happen, but I can't see any tenable alternatives. It would be nice to wake up and find it was not tomorrow but some day in 1999, but I can't see that happening, somehow.

Sometimes I think the last ten years of my life have been a complete waste. But that's probably the influence of LJ.

Hayat acıdır. Biber acıdır. O zaman, hayat biberdir.
[Life is bitter. Pepper is bitter. Therefore life is a pepper.]

Comments

[bonscott.livejournal.com]

hi. your journal was recommended to me by anna, and i added it to my daily routine after enjoying the few entries that i read. that's all i have to say for now.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Glad you enjoy it!

cynicism vs tragic optimism

[ex-barza.livejournal.com]

"Life is bitter. Pepper is bitter. Therefore life is a pepper"

sigh.. my mom always says "I eat Korolla (a bitter bengali vegetable), because it describes my life"

did i mention cynicism sucks? "tragic optimism" on the other hand rules :)

-Sukayna (drinks grapefruit juice and thinks the bitterness subsides after you sip it for a while or if it doesn't just get the ruby red kind)

Re: cynicism vs tragic optimism

[solri.livejournal.com]

How would you define "tragic optimism"?

Re: cynicism vs tragic optimism

[ex-barza.livejournal.com]

Eh, "tragic optimism" is a concept coined by Viktor Frankl (know him?) , a Vienese psychiatrist who survived the holocaust and started a school of psychotherapy called "logotherapy"...

it basically means what it says ...optimism in the brink of tragedy

So um anyway the general idea is that people can find meaning in their suffering/struggles by turning them into human achievement.

ex. guilt about a past event can be used to change for the better
or as Frankl likes to say "use the fleeting tendency of life as an incentive for responsible action"

I think Frankl did this by writing "Man's search for Meaning", based on his camp experiences (which i've read obsessively since 18)


-Sukayna (is rambling and incoherent cause she had like no sleep last night)

Re: cynicism vs tragic optimism

[solri.livejournal.com]

I looked a bit at stuff about Viktor Frankl and logotherapy on the Net when I was researching a course last year but I'm not really familiar with his work. Am I right in thinking he's a kind of humanistic existentialist? I'll see if "Man's Search for meaning" is in the library.

Re: cynicism vs tragic optimism

[ex-barza.livejournal.com]

"Am I right in thinking he's a kind of humanistic existentialist?

yup that's the exact term to describe him...
existential psyche is very cool...and free of the yucky determinism/nihilism present in the other schools cover you with..

um I just bought one of his books..the rest i got from the lib. ....check out his fascinating autobiography too

[solri.livejournal.com]

Just noticed a typo - it shouldn't have been 1999 but 1989! 1999 was nothing to write home about, but 1989 was a good year. The Cold War was ending, I was sufficiently employed to keep body and soul together but not working so much I couldn't enjoy life, and I had a girlfriend who could engage in torrid sex and then explain post-strucuralism to me. Of course it all fell apart in 1990, but hey, that's life.