In the 1940s & 50s, Maslow & [Carl] Rogers championed a view that preferred to see human beings as something more than just molecules of meat. They felt it was wrong to assume you could approach the mind as a biological machine that could be repaired & improved at the level of its cogs & gears. Instead, they advocated something that still reverberates in the public consciousness today: a holistic approach to mental health. They saw you as a creature with a sense of self & a desire for improvement of that self.
That final goal was called SELF-ACTUALIZATION.
Rogers called the gap between how you see yourself & how you really are incongruence.
Moving toward congruence, toward matching reality with your subjective experience, the happier you become. You no longer lie about your abilities or hide your shortcomings, but instead would be a totally open book during both introspection & conversation.
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The idea that people would be happier if they maintained a constant state of realism is a beautiful sentiment, but [researchers Shelley & Jonathon] Taylor & Brown found just the opposite. They presented a new theory that suggested that well-being came from unrealistic views of reality. They said you reduce the stress of terminal illness or a high-pressure job or unexpected tragedy by resorting to optimism & delusion. Your wildly inaccurate self-evaluations get you thru rough times & help motivate you when times are good.
Later research backed up their claims, showing that people who are brutally honest with themselves are not as happy day to day as people with unrealistic assumptions about their abilities. People who take credit for the times when things go their way but who put the blame on others when they stumble or fall are generally happier people.
Your explanatory style exists along a gradient. At one end is a black swamp of unrealistic negative opinions about life & your place in it. At the other end is an overexposed candy-cane forest of unrealistic positive opinions about how other people see you & your own competence. Right below the midpoint of this spectrum is a place where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of objectivity. Positive illusions evaporate there, & the family of perceptions mutating off the self-serving bias cannot take root.
About 20 percent of all people live in that spot, & psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism. If your explanatory style rests in that area of the spectrum, you tend to experience a moderate level of depression more often than not because you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. You have a strange superpower--the ability to see the world closer to what it really is. Your more accurate representations of social reality make you feel bad & weird mainly because most people have a reality-distortion module implanted in their heads; sadly, yours is either missing or malfunctioning. The notion of depressed realism has its naysayers, but meta-analysis of the last few decades of research still favors the concept. It also shows that even if you are one of those people who seem to have misplaced their rose-tinted glasses, you can't eliminate positive illusions entirely.
They may shrink up to dehydrated specks & look tiny alongside their giant delusional counterparts inside your most optimistic peers, but they don't completely disappear.
TO BE A PERSON IS TO BE IRRATIONALLY POSITIVE ABOUT YOUR ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND & AFFECT THE WORLD AROUND YOU.
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