Cynicism, pessimism, negativity, and radical new-school thinking.
It is easy, self-centered, and instantly gratifying, clean, green, and renewable, and practically free of challenge or charge. Minimal sacrifice, minimal faith, and best of all, no hope to get in the way.
Profess it loudly in a room and the applause is practically automatic, with the bonus of bringing everyone else down. I can think of nothing more satisfying than ensuring the misery of someone who was smiling. Happy people are winners, and I am Ms. Negative, the cynic, the pessimist, the loser.
Here’s to the losers! I am a sarcastic, cynical, pessimistic, pedantic professor of negative energy, and I have decided that losing is the new winning. I’ll extend the toast to selfishness, loneliness, and ignorance too, since each takes one simple step, which is to consider only myself with every action, every decision, and every word. Nearly everyone has felt like a loser at some point, so the toast earns instant applause. I have to be careful, though. If the crowd cheers too hard, some of them might wander into happiness, and that would wreck the whole point.
What I get out of all this is ease. I never have to change, to labor, to learn, to grow, or to care. I never have to stop and smell the roses, let alone share one. Above all I must avoid love, because love spreads and I am busy spreading something else. I even deny myself love, lest I smile.
If I love myself exactly as I am, there is no need to change. Some call it laziness, but laziness needs a philosophy to lean on, so I lean on cynicism (why bother?), pessimism (it won’t matter), and negativity (fuck it all anyway). Now the gratification is complete.
Of course my words might reach the people around me, my friends, my family, my neighbors, my teachers, my co-workers, anyone I hold in high regard. I am simply not responsible for what they do with them. Everyone controls their own reactions, so negative energy needn’t beget negative energy, as long as they are in charge of their choices and I am not.
But I am in full control of my own words, and that means I bear some responsibility for how they land. Say someone tells me what a lovely day it is, and I answer, “What’s lovely about it?” Say I do that every time, for the rest of my life, to anyone who comes at me with a little light. Has the world grown worse because of me? Maybe their face falls. Maybe their eyes drop from the brightness of the sun to the darkness of the dirt, and they think, you’re right. It is a beautiful day, and my mom is in the hospital, and I let the sun make me forget. Today is not so lovely after all. I hold no blame for that. I only pointed their attention back to where it belongs, on their mother, or their own health, or any of the hundred things that deserve worry more than weather. What is all this fuss over caring for others?
Later they might look up again and lighten. A hug from a friend might help. Hugs are a waste of time, and so is laughter, and so is all the giggling and goofing off children do for the sake of fun, which is nothing but waste. Laughter is coal, and it burns off. Misery renews itself every morning. I must protect my supply, because if I spend my smiles on others, they might feel better and do something kind for someone else, and where would that end?
There is a problem, though. If the happy are losers, then I am a winner for being sad. But winners go with the grain, and negativity is more plentiful in this world than anything else, so by the crowd’s count I am winning, and I refuse to respect the crowd. The only way out is to change my mind, and I have made that impossible. So I remain a lazy, cynical, pessimistic, pedantic, selfish, lonely, ignorant professor of negativity, sharing my unhappiness with everyone who shares it back, which makes us moderately happy, and never as happy as those losers who are happy all the time.
Here’s to the losers.
Since gradeschool, whenever I have shown up happy, someone has worked to make sure I didn’t stay that way, or at least to let me know they weren’t happy either. Nobody outgrows it. The kids just get taller.
Friends start saying “I love you” to each other, and within a couple of weeks it catches on. The community grows, the friendships grow fonder, and then some asshole announces that everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid and challenges the sincerity of every word. That same person goes to church to pray, an activity that brings them happiness. In the meantime, fewer people say “I love you,” afraid of another onslaught of cynicism.
A few friends get drunk and behave like children, giddy to be together, done worrying how they look because they love and trust each other. They want fun for fun’s sake and push it as far into silliness as it will stretch. Someone tells them to grow up, that they are distracting, disruptive, and annoying. Weeks later that same someone acts like a complete ass with their own friends, in the same childlike spirit, and from then on the first group hesitates. Being ridiculous together was one of the sweetest things about them. Now each of them checks before they laugh.
The heaviest armor ever forged by humanity is a cynical heart, and that the sharpest weapon in the universe remains the simple, terrifying risk of being seen.
We are responsible for our reactions, yes, and we are also responsible for our actions and our words. If I scream “SHUT UP” in a crowded room, I get silence. If I take a grieving friend aside, I can listen, and offer whatever wisdom and warmth I have. I might help, I might not, but I showed up, and sometimes showing up is all anyone needs. If I don’t, it is true that I am not responsible for what they do next, but I am responsible for what I didn’t do. My inaction was an action. Choosing to do something else changes something else.
People say happy people are fooling themselves, that a smile is a way of dodging life, and that without sorrow there can be no wisdom. I couldn’t disagree more. Everyone feels pain, and everyone fails more often than they succeed. We just don’t all have to answer sorrow with endless days of looking miserable.
Smiling is one of the hardest things I do. Every minute I’m awake there is a battle over what my mind has left to spend, and still I find the strength to smile, to make a joke, to laugh, to notice something beautiful, because I can. If it helps someone, I don’t need them to remember that it was me.
Whatever leaves me begins in me, and I have come to believe that everything we throw will stick, however small it seems. On the darkest nights I look up and find the moon, glowing on borrowed light from a sun I can’t see, and giving that light away to every sleeping roof and river below. Under a heavy gray sky I watch the clouds, and what moves me is that no cloud has ever held the same shape twice, and the one drifting over me now will be gone before I finish looking, which makes me the only witness it will ever have. When snow settles on every branch of a tree just right, I stand out in the cold and stare, because the branches carry such a heavy weight so gently that it looks like blossom, and the whole street falls silent, since snow soaks up sound. I stay until the cold gets through my gloves, and I can no longer tell whether the wind is the reason my eyes are wet.
Monday is my favorite day of the week, because it is the day everyone gets to begin again together. I have a job I am thankful to have, and each Monday it hands me a list of the good things I still hold, the people, the paycheck, and the plain purpose of being needed somewhere. Work is my church. I go there to meet new people and to learn something about myself, and I pay my dues and get paid, which strikes me as a fair and holy trade. Everyone else is on the road at the same hour, rubbing sleep from their eyes, a drink going warm in one cup holder, a hospital parking pass swinging from another mirror, and one morning you notice that you are all headed the same direction, headlights on in the gray.
You can smile at a frowning face in the car beside yours at a red light, windows down, and say, “Isn’t it a lovely day?” The person might say, “What’s lovely about it?” because their mom is in the hospital and it is all they have been able to think about since they woke. Then the light turns green, you both drive off, and you decide you made a bad morning worse.
Later, at some other stoplight, that person lifts their eyes to the sun and smiles anyway, barely, somewhere beneath their face, and it feels the same as a real one. At lunch they call the hospital, and when their mother picks up they say what you said to them that morning, almost word for word. Their mother turns toward the window. Sunlight spills across the blanket, a tree outside sways in it, and someone who loves them has called in the middle of a workday. It really is a lovely day, their mother thinks.
That may be the last thing their mother remembers, and it began with a sentence you said at a red light to a stranger whose name you never learned.
—lyra moon (submitted for your consideration…an invisible economy where every word is currency, every silence is an investment, and nobody ever dies in debt to the dark)
september 21, 2026