One of my prize possessions in my younger and more wayward years was a poster entitled Murphy's Law: Murphy Was an Optimist. It was a wittily bleak collection of sayings that expressed various iterations of "What can go wrong will go wrong." Some standout tidbits from this dubious wallhanging included:

To know thyself is the ultimate form of aggression.
If everything seems to be going well, you obviously don't know what the hell is going on.
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes to the bone.
The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an oncoming train.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. (My personal favorite.)

While the copy on the poster did take things to an exceptionally snarky extreme, I considered the spirit of the words to be of the deepest wisdom—speaking the incontrovertible truth of the human experience: life's a bitch, then you die. Life was out there just waiting to shit big messy realities upon you, and woe betide the soul who was ill-equipped to handle these inevitabilities, those naive, clueless dingbats who were convinced that everything was going to be just fine.

And I stuck with that attitude for a long time. But it turns out being a cynical, contrarian, curmudgeonly naysayer all the time is really exhausting. To say nothing of the self-fulfilling-prophecy aspects to all of it that just transform you into a self-defeating drag who no one wants to be around. When you are so acutely aware of how badly things can go wrong, how deeply people can hurt you, how incredibly disappointing everything has the potential to be, eventually, any space you might have had to think differently about things shrinks away, leaving you with nothing but your certainty that everything is awful. Soon you're self-sabotaging any ounce of happiness you might have, knowing it will only be taken from you. Every time things are going really well, you find yourself cringing against the inevitability that everything is going to fuck up. You distance yourself from contentment and joy, recognizing them as being the tragically ephemeral states they are.

So, yeah. It turns out that's no way to go through life. So I've been working on being less of a negative bitch. (Well, being less negative at least.) And for the most part, my efforts have been rewarded with increased happiness, more satisfying friendships, greater productivity, blah, blah, blah.

But I'm realizing there is a price.

Relinquishing cynicism and negativity requires a certain level of earnestness and kindness—to oneself to those around you. When you stop thinking everything is going to go to shit and start, instead, work to believe that everything is going to be fundamentally okay, you have to do so with a degree of ingenuousness and guilelessness, and a decided lack of sarcasm.

A *decided lack of sarcasm*.

Sarcasm is the cornerstone of what passes for my sense of humor. Sarcasm is how my version of wit is communicated to the world. Bone-dry sarcasm, delivered in a monotone that gives people that pause, wondering if I'm joking or not, and usually offending someone in the process.

My weakened powers of sarcasm and offensive humor have been increasingly apparent to me over the last several months. Most recently, I was witness to some admirably dry banter between TK and a friend of his—a situation that I normally might have contributed to easily. But I found myself at a loss, having only insightful observations to make on the topic at hand and earnest questions to ask. Sarcastic jokes flew lightly between them, while I sat wordless. Nothing I had to say would fit at all into the joking mood of the conversation.

I'm noticing this regrettable earnestness popping up with increasing frequency. The occasions that a good joke does bubble up, it's usually at a highly inappropriate time (e.g., client meeting, during a dental cleaning) or at four in the morning, when no one's awake to enjoy my fit of wit.

This is not to say I'm humorless now. But it's more of that bad third-grade-joke humor. Jokes about pterodactyls peeing and talking peanuts. And penguins. Gone is my edgy and vulgar humor, the fruits of my gutter brain. No more are my hilariously cruel observations of ugly children and drunk people. And on the rare occasions when I can whip out something truly, delightfully offensive, I am overcome with remorse, worried I've hurt someone's feelings or betrayed myself to be an incontrovertible asshole.

It seems that giving a shit is a side-effect of divesting oneself of nihilistic cynicism. Who knew? So the question to ask now is, is it worth it?