It’s a jungle out there. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Kill to eat, or you may wind up as someone’s lunch.

Humans harbor the capacity for unimaginable evil. Read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Read Victor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. To this day, children are born, live, and die on the streets of Kolkata (Calcutta). From Stalin to Mao Tse-tung, from Genghis Khan to Hitler, history is full of people believing "one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

Knowing this, how can one stay sane and function effectively amongst such cruelty? How did Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi do it? What’s the best strategy to survive and thrive in this seemingly unjust, bat-crazy world?

One can study history and become paralyzed by the evil we continue to inflict on each other, our planet, and other species. Today, we are amazed and ashamed that 150 years ago, America, the land of the free, the shiny city on the hill, sanctioned slavery. Seven generations from now, our descendants may be equally amazed and ashamed to learn we factory-farmed other sentient beings to eat and that a Chinese gourmand craze was eating the brains of live monkeys.

Another way to look at humanity’s current state of affairs is to realize we have never had it as good as today, where, on average, a blue-collar worker lives better and longer than a king did 200 years ago.

In short, we can live as an optimist or a pessimist. We can focus on the negative and suffer, or we can imagine what is possible and hope for better days ahead.

"There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Instead of obsessing over the damage to the vessel, let’s focus on the light shining through it.

I am a realist and an optimist, joyfully participating in the sorrows of the world.

— Sina.