A new study from Boston University School of Medicine suggests that optimists are likely to live longer than pessimists. The reasons are not entirely clear, but according to clinical research psychologist Lewina Lee, who led the study — while we know about the obvious risk factors for longevity such as smoking, heart disease, obesity, alcoholism, depression and poor diet, “we know relatively less about positive psychosocial factors that can promote healthy ageing.”
This is (obviously) good news for the natural-born optimists among us, assuming that optimism is a heritable trait. It has serious implications, too, for how health might be better managed at national level. But above all, it will be music to the ears of publishers in the burgeoning lifestyle genre, looking to commission the Next Big Thing. Let’s call it op-lit.
In the past few years we’ve been bombarded with manuals on how to achieve happiness and good health, from “hygge” and eating cinnamon buns like the Danes, to embracing core principles of micro-meditating like Tibetan Buddhist monks, to living the Ikigai way like the Japanese centenarians of Okinawa: working long hours and drinking tea.
The latest in this relentless and barmy trend is Lessons in Stoicism, out next week, by John Sellars, a lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. He suggests we follow the advice of Epictetus by avoiding the company of people whose lives embody everything we are trying to avoid, or that we learn from Marcus Aurelius to accept what is not in our control and to focus our efforts on what is. You get the gist.
The pessimistic counterpart to this zeitgeisty “up-lit” is its popular and profitable counterpart, down-lit, which began in the mid-Nineties, when American author Dave Pelzer wrote A Child Called “It”, a sensational account of his abuse at the hands of his alcoholic mum. It became a bestseller and was swiftly followed by a host of copycat misery memoirs, as they were dubbed, notably Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. The key element was pessimism tempered by hope.
Times have moved on and the master of the moment is now Matt Haig, whose account of his own depression and subsequent recovery in his 2015 memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, remains a bestseller. Similarly Max Porter’s grief memoir, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, was a cult hit, while Sally Rooney’s superb novel, Normal People, is essentially the work of another deeply committed pessimist.
The best writing, after all, is often about suffering. Where would we be without great literary doomsters and gloomsters such as Pascal and Leopardi? Dostoevsky, Camus or Kafka? Samuel Beckett or Michel Houellebecq? The list is endless, the writing unequalled. Even if a new “how to live longer” up-lit becomes all the rage, let’s not douse the flames of literary pessimism. It’s the stuff of life.
