Is your glass half full or half empty?

HERE is a brilliant article by Patrick Lawrence Gilligan, published recently on Thoroughbred Racing website.

How much do you love racing?

Optimists tend to be wrong more often than pessimists. However, optimists tend to be happier than pessimists. It seems it is better to go through life in ignorant bliss, and perhaps just receive a nasty shock right at the end, than to correctly predict the whole world is heading to hell in a hand basket – or whatever the saying is.

I like to think of myself as a realist, but more and more lately it seems hard to separate a realist from a pessimist, just as it is increasingly difficult lately to distinguish the difference between an optimist and a raving lunatic.

I am going to give it a go though. It is a new year. Now, I’m not saying that I got an uncomfortable feeling last New Year’s Eve when everyone was high fiving and whooping about 2020. How this was going to be THE year!!! But I did. Well they were right, it was THE year,  just not in the way they expected.

I don’t think 2021 is going to be much to whoop about either, with climate change still there lurking behind the dread fog of Covid. Standing on the cusp of a possible economic black swan. We may find that 2020 was the beginning of a new reality. That this time they really were the good old days, those past decades.

But I am going to be an optimist for once, I am going to ignore all the facts, the data, human nature, all the dinosaur bones, and deliver an upbeat message through the medium of horseracing. Because in 2020 this declining, ever-less-relevant industry (in most people’s eyes anyway) delivered us diversion, entertainment, excitement and – perhaps most importantly – days to look forward to. And that is something to really be happy about.

Read full article here.

Image: Thanks to Charlie Mackesy on Equilink.