Yes, you were once an optimist

On the dust jacket of the operators manual for the mind:

We are in a state of grace in our infancy because we have no model that requires reasons, no notion of cause, effect or propriety. We accept all that happens. [we don't like some things then to be sure but there is not the added stress of thinking "that should not have happened"] Youth is a miserable time because we have learned, sometimes over our father's knee, that actions have consequences, there are causes and effects, there are reasons. We come to demand reasons. We try to fit all experience into this model...it breaks. We are hurt. We can be so hurt we start revolutions to make the world be as it should be. The great feat of maturity is to relinquish that model, not doing so as an act of defeat but as a progression to a new vision of the struggle, a view where, for some things, there are no reasons or bigger reasons than we can comprehend and, child-like again, we accept, we cease our futile fight against what is.

Caution: many books purport to be this manual...I am not sure I got the real one.