Half Full or Half Empty(ish)

You are probably acquainted with the ageless question of the “Half Full” and the “Half Empty” glass, right? To summarize, a glass is filled (or emptied) to its halfway point and is judged by one person as half full, by another as half empty. This owes, it is often said, to an individual’s prevailing outlook on life as being either optimistic or pessimistic. Personally, I don’t think this is necessarily a good test of one’s positivity or negativity. Based on widely varying personality types and problem-solving methodologies, I think either view is as good as the other. One person may assume that the glass was full at some point in time, and he may strive to find a solution which would restore the entire contents of the glass. Another person, believing that the glass was filled to the halfway point (but never full), may question why it was not filled to 100% capacity in the first place. They may deduce that something, yet to be determined, has prevented the glass from being completely filled and then attempt to solve the problem. Both of these views are viable but not particularly optimistic or pessimistic.

Another way to look at this, regarding an optimistic or pessimistic view of things, is to say the glass is “only” half full or “only” half empty. Putting it this way, the half empty view would probably be regarded as more positive than the half full view. Then again, I suppose “only half full” is actually just another way to say “half empty”; so perhaps that is not a sound argument.

A better assessment of a person’s overall sense of optimism or pessimism–or at least a method by which one might determine how someone thinks–may be discovered by showing each person one glass that is almost full and one that is almost empty. One person might cynically declare the “almost full” glass to be “partially empty”. Another may surprisingly assess the “almost empty” glass as being “partially full”. Either of those answers would be a departure from the presumed “obvious” answer and would leave room (no pun intended) for more inquiry into that person’s thought process.

Then again, many people might opt out of this exercise altogether, concluding that we ought never have been judged this way in the first place, that people have different perspectives, and that “sometimes”, as even Freud once exclaimed, “a cigar is just a cigar”.