I can tell you now, this article is really going to turn out well. If you just stick with it through these first few lines, I guarantee you'll never regret the decision. Whatever you may think of anything I've written in the past, this is really going to be something special. I'm brimming with relevant insights and I've absolutely no doubts about my ability to express them. I can already imagine the positive response when the piece comes out, too: compliments from more experienced journalists, good "feedback" from the often hard-to-please people who write comments on the internet, and ultimately an offer to take over the editorship of this newspaper – which I will modestly decline, saying I "just want to get on with telling the truth". What a ride this is going to be!
That is what my interior monologue ought to sound like, because as of my 30th birthday – which occurred in February, further setting back my faint hope of turning out to be immortal – I have vowed to become an optimist. This optimism will incorporate positivity about my future prospects (as demonstrated above) and a more general tendency to be upbeat about the experience of being alive. I have given myself 10 years to accomplish what adds up to a complete overhaul of my personality and world view. On my 40th birthday I will be a sunny, confident individual, unrecognisable from the carping sourpuss who muttered his way reluctantly through the past couple of decades. If everything goes according to plan, that is. Which, since I'm being optimistic, I believe it will.
Well, maybe. Even to muster the transparently false cheer of the above paragraphs was quite a draining effort. Pessimism is so intrinsic to my personality that asking myself to renounce it is no less of an undertaking than asking Ant and Dec to be more gloomy. Expecting the worst is a reflex over which I have little more control than sneezing. This is partly because of the way habits harden over time, and partly because it's simply the sensible thing to do.
Some time ago I had a joke in my standup set about my dad "softening the blow" of Father Christmas's imaginariness by presenting me with two scenarios: "Would you rather Father Christmas didn't exist… or your mum was dead?" The young Mark's response: "I'd rather Father Christmas didn't exist." Dad: "Right then, good news coming up!" Behind the gag is a robust strategy for dealing with life's miseries: pull the rug from under them by expecting even worse miseries. If you're braced for the sky to fall, then a mere hailstorm is, relatively, pretty good news. To update Oscar Wilde: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us aren't too bothered because we fully anticipated being there, and indeed were expecting a much filthier gutter." A pessimist, as Sophie Ellis-Bextor sang in her 1990s indie band Theaudience, is never disappointed. (The rest of the band soon vanished without trace, but presumably they were well prepared for that.)
So pessimism is a kind of extra skin, insulating you against the chilly realities of life's downside; going out into the world without it has never made any more sense to me than venturing out on a winter's day without a coat – or, in Britain, going out on any day of the year without a coat. The gig you desperately wanted to go to is sold out? No problem – it's easy to deal with emotionally, because you've spent the past two weeks imagining this very scenario. Arrive at an isolated hotel, miles from civilisation, at midnight after a nine-hour drive, only to find they're all booked up? Well, at least you don't look like you were caught out, because you took care to phrase your enquiry: "I don't suppose in my wildest dreams there is even the slenderest chance of fluking a room in your establishment?" Your house burns down: at least through the lick of the flames and the sound of screams, passers-by will be able to hear you murmuring: "This is exactly what would happen." Negative expectations are a sort of insurance policy which pays out by successfully convincing you and others that your misfortune can't be so bad, because it's all part of some bleak narrative which you were wise to all along. (And, being a pessimist, you also have a real insurance policy to cover it.)
But the flaw in this as a way of life is probably pretty clear: as a companion it makes you about as appealing as Richard Wilson's character in One Foot in the Grave, and without even the consolation of Angus Deayton dropping in from time to time. Pessimists aren't a lot of fun, which is why many of us end up alone, wallowing in our own gloom: Sesame Street naysayer Oscar the Grouch, who lives on his own in a trash can, provides one of the most sobering examples of how expecting the worst can leave people expecting the worst of you. My wife has always stopped short of suggesting that I move out of our bedroom into the wheelie bin – not least because we share it with two other households – but she has frequently hinted that she might prefer it if I were more inclined to see the glass as half-full rather than, as now, either half-empty or full of something I'm allergic to.
Moreover, we've recently been lucky enough to have a baby (naturally I assumed something would go wrong, but no). This means that the repercussions of my negativity will affect not just one, but two people – one of them small enough to be alarmed if we're on a plane and I start openly predicting it will drop out of the sky.
Despite the above joke about my father's blow-softening tendencies, my parents have always made an effort to reassure their children rather than crushing them under the weight of reality. Many an arduous drive was lightened by my mother's hopeful commentary ("Not long to go… can't be far away now") in an era before satellite navigation systems removed the fun of speculation from journeys. Many a miserable rainy day at the football was given a positive outlook by Dad's Candide-like weather forecasting ("Brightening up over there… definitely starting to ease off, this rain…"). Even when aware that I was being sold a spin-doctored version of events, I was much happier to have my parents form the last line of defence like this than I would have been if they had said: "I can't see us arriving before 3am," or "One of us will surely die of pneumonia before this match ends." I owe it to my own son to carry on the family tradition of parental confidence in the face of daunting odds.
There's also a valid school of thought that suggests that pessimistic prophecies tend to be self-fulfilling ones: if you go around expecting life to kick you, it will normally oblige, just as if you were constantly saying: "You must really hate me" to your friends, they would start to be persuaded that they did. With a positive attitude, you leave yourself open to opportunities; with a negative one, you erect a force field around yourself and repel what good fortune might have come your way. This is what self-help experts say. Their case is slightly weakened by the fact that self-help is not a scientific field and so it's not really possible to be an expert. But even if it is pure speculation, the idea that optimism creates its own, better reality is a nice one to cling on to. When you add it to the motive of trying to stop my family from falling apart, you can see why, in February this year, I decided to take the plunge.
Actually, plunge is rather too… well, optimistic a way of putting it. So far it's been more of a paddle. The hefty 10-year time scale I've allowed myself is meant to ensure that I don't overdo the good vibes too early, potentially dealing a fatal shock to my system like someone suddenly leaping from hot water into a tub of ice. I've contented myself so far with studying the habits of successful optimists I know and am now putting into practice a few of their key tricks.
The first is quite simply not to think too much. The more you think about anything, the more complicated it becomes, and therefore the more alarming it is. If you think about death as going to sleep for an unusually long time, it's not too unpalatable a prospect; if you begin pondering the idea of a universe in which every trace of you has been snuffed out, it's enough to make you shiver uncontrollably on public transport, or in the middle of a picnic, or wherever else the thought breaks out. Whenever I say something like this to optimists, they tell me they "don't really think about it". Likewise, a surgeon of my acquaintance claims never to think about making a disastrous mistake; footballers often say the prospect of defeat doesn't even cross their minds; if you mention the idea of crashing to an air stewardess she will tell you it's impossible. It's not so much lying to yourself as simply not engaging yourself in conversation. What you refuse to think about can't bother you.
I've been trying to apply this cheerful form of denial to my everyday dealings. I now try to prepare for a gig as if it's a fait accompli that it will go well, rather than my old tactic of thinking: "Let's hope this isn't the night that ends my career." Not surprisingly, this tends to put me in a good mood, which in turn translates into a better atmosphere at the show. Rather than seeing every day as an obstacle course in which (like a boy at school, who I'm sure has grown up to be a pessimist) I'm destined to get my ear stuck in a cargo net, I now treat potential problems almost as if they weren't there. If I'm about to make a difficult phone call or tackle a worrying administrative problem, I approach it as if it's a breeze. It's surprising how easy it is to pull the wool over your own eyes, making one half of your brain sing: "La la la la la!" to drown out the concerned noises being made by the other half; and how often problems obligingly shrink to fit the importance you're prepared to give them, even disappearing entirely on some occasions.
By thinking a lot less than I was three months ago, I've cut down on all sorts of disagreeable mental habits which made up about 90% of my thoughts. I no longer waste as much time comparing myself with others, either in professional or personal spheres, and wondering why I haven't achieved more or don't have a better method of peeling an orange. Comparing yourself to others may inspire you to double your workload, but in my case it's chiefly a chance to double my worry load. Even when things are going well, there will always be someone like Obama who can not only revolutionise a nation's healthcare system but also play basketball. It's much better to remain indifferent to these spoilsports, even if it means keeping yourself in ignorance. Many other draining aspects of pessimism – fear, introspection, cowardice – can be shut down with a similar drive towards indifference. Thinking is enormously overrated. That's one of the biggest things I've learnt from optimists.
Another related lesson is that it's well worth asking yourself: "What's the worst that can happen?" Fairly often I'm enjoying the headlong lurch into doom so much that there's scarcely any time to consider what the nature of that doom is. Recently I discovered that I'd lost some forms that needed to be sent off quite urgently. I spent, as usual, a fair amount of time and energy cursing myself, my flat, the forms, the invention of paper itself and the previous few generations for giving me the chance to exist. Such a good job had I done of convincing myself that things were disastrous, it was a while before it occurred to me that I could simply phone up and get duplicate forms sent out. Likewise, an attempt to book train tickets, foiled by a faulty internet connection, sent me into a frenzy of exaggerated reactions. The prices go up every day! If I don't book them this minute, it'll cost well over a million pounds to go from London to Manchester! When I did manage to get tickets booked, the following day, the price had only risen by £11. I'd certainly have paid someone £11 to calm me down; I might even have stretched to £15. Once again the business of worrying had overwhelmed any question of what the worrying was about. Another lesson learnt.
What's probably made me resistant to these fairly obvious truths in the past is that they tend to be expressed in rather smug terms. "What's the worst that can happen?" and its various colleagues – "Cheer up, it might never happen", "Well, at least nobody's died", "Look on the bright side, you could be in Afghanistan" (or, to make it more relevant to a touring standup, Stoke) – all these bright-and-breezy truisms of the natural optimist tend to grate badly in times of misfortune. But the fact that they're so often infuriating shouldn't be allowed to obscure the fact that they're also often very accurate.
What's needed, perhaps, is a hybrid of pessimism and positivity – provisionally called "posimism" – which acknowledges that life is often disappointing, but at least gives it a chance to prove you wrong: the same mixture of hope and resignation which you might employ when picking up a Dan Brown novel or going to the seaside on a bank holiday. Rather than ploughing through in the unnervingly (and unsustainably) chirpy manner of the beginning of this article, I'm going to see the rest of the decade as a series of trips to Bridlington. There might well be threatening kids in the arcades, we might have to park three miles away and walk, and it could easily rain from sunrise to sunset. But maybe, just maybe, things will all turn out fine.
Follow Mark's progress on his blog, markwatsonthecomedian.com
Mark Watson is a comedian and writer. His new novel, Eleven (Simon & Schuster, £12.99), is out in August