Or consider this: Many people believe there is no God, that the only purposes in life are those people manage to create for themselves, and that when they die, they rot. If this is so, why are so many of these same people cheerful? The capacity to blind ourselves to our own deeply held negative beliefs may be our remarkable defense against

Third, while Weiner was interested in achievement, we were focused on mental illness and therapy.

We knew the cause of learned helplessness, and now we could see it as the cause of depression: the belief that your actions will be futile. This belief was engendered by defeat and failure as well as by uncontrollable situations. Depression could be caused by defeat, failure, and loss and the consequent belief that any actions taken will be futile.

This is the central prediction from my theory: People who have a pessimistic explanatory style and suffer bad events will probably become depressed, whereas people who have an optimistic explanatory style and suffer bad events will tend to resist depression.

The first, selection, was the subject of chapter six, “Success at Work.” Your company can select optimistic individuals to fill its ranks, as Metropolitan Life did.

They don’t purvey an absolute, unconditional optimism for you to apply blindly in all situations; they offer a flexible optimism. They aim to increase your control over the way you think about adversity.

But the problem may not be the divorce itself. The root of the problem may be the parents’ fighting.

Optimists recover from their momentary helplessness immediately. Very soon after failing, they pick themselves up, shrug, and start trying again. For them, defeat is a challenge, a mere setback on the road to inevitable victory. They see defeat as temporary and specific, not pervasive.

If your pessimism score is in the average range, it will not be a problem in ordinary times. But in crisis, in the hard times life deals us all, you will likely pay an unnecessary price. When these events strike, you may find yourself getting more depressed than you should.