NO! Surprised?

In the field of science to which I belong ‘being realistic’ is treated as the right way to go about either in research or in life.

The thing that makes us truly strong is ‘being realistic’, neither positivity nor negativity. Being positive makes us expect too much. It is not a very effective tool and can be downright harmful in some cases, when you don’t get the picture right and anticipate more than you put efforts into a situation. That is like creating an illusion and kidding yourself!

There are much better ways to get the benefits that positive thinking allegedly provides. Can you actually go through life without labelling what happens to you as good or bad? Yes, you can. You have to train yourself to do this. You have been conditioned to think of things as bad or good. You can de-condition yourself.

Think of our pain and suffering as being hit by two arrows. The first arrow, the inevitable pain of life, whether a difficult event, thought or feeling, is shot at us; we have little control over this. But then we shoot a second arrow at ourselves with our own reaction to the pain, amplifying and prolonging it. The suffering from the refusal or pushing away of this pain, the "it shouldn’t be here," the "I can’t stand this," but also the blaming, the ruminating, the "why me?" the "it’s always been this way and always going to be this way" stories: these are the parts we add. To put it simply: pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

Just see things and situations exactly as they are, analyse them neutrally using facts and true knowledge and realize the truth, not illusion like positive thinking shows, and tackle it in the right way. Just because you think positively and wish that something would happen, it will not happen without making the right efforts. An example: Majority of the poor people in the world daily wish they had money to have a decent living, food and housing. They wish and pray for it. But do they get what they want with just this positive thinking? NO!

If you think just positive thinking helps you, it just is your perception, not the truth.

Failures might occur in life. When they do, you should revisit your problem, analyse it thoroughly and realistically in an enlightened way and think you haven't found a proper solution to it yet and that's why you couldn't overcome it, then try to get one, increase your efficiency of the effort, plug the loopholes and go after it with all your might to defeat it.

That is the realistic way of doing things.

Science is objective because it allows us to create maps that we can test together by comparing them with the results of experiments. This is real realism.