I agree very much with Farmergirl on this.

I wouldn't say it is wrong per say, I don't want to judge it. I would say that being too cynical might give us selected perception of the world we live in. A partial sampling, which we can make seem as though that is all there is. I know you struggle with the bad in the world a lot. I struggle with this myself.

I remember you had a thread, and I replied that I think the world is actually getting better slowly. And yes maybe too slow for our liking. In my view I see the world coming together more collectively on a lot of issues. And to me it seems to pick up speed over the centuries, much like technology does in this century.

I don't think humanity sucks on the whole, yes we have some huge problems, I do think humanity is slowly becoming more aware, starting to question more "what are we doing" and seeking some truth. So what I see is the world slowly putting out fires.

The neglecting your own stuff bit, I think famergirl and you are on the right track with that. Also if you see the world as hopeless and burning, why would you want to bother, I think would would make the effort seem futile.

When you say clashing between what you want and reality. I think about contradictions, this came up yesterday in a different thread. But I think the way our human minds work, we want order, we are not so good with contradictions, even if our world is naturally full of contradiction.

I think we usually try to deal with contradiction by using one to cancel out the other. As if one is proof that the other is false, or that we must choose one. But it could also be that they both exist contrary to one another and define one another's existence. In that case we could also try to unify the two.

But we have a tendency to pick one or the other, or sometimes just not pick either at all, so we stagnate. I hope that make some sense.

Who says you have to have children to have family? Is all family merely because we have passed some DNA down?