Basement Whatever

• To be a real optimist, you need to be serious: you need to be a part of something greater than yourself.
• To be serious, you have to be externally focused (striving for something external, in service of others, in surrender to a higher mission), not caught up in your own head.
• To achieve true external focus, you probably need to struggle a lot. And it won’t be the romantic kind of struggling either; you are going to look ridiculous.

More here.