The Glass



A lot of people like to define either themselves or others, or both, in terms of whether they are “glass half full” or “glass half empty” people, a well-known modern metaphor to express inclination towards either optimism or pessimism. There’s a famous Far Side cartoon which expresses this brilliantly: there are four frames, showing four different people each. Each person is confronted with the same glass partially filled with water. The caption of the cartoon is “The Four Basic Personality Types”.

The first frame shows The Happy Person, the optimist, with their hands exultantly in the air, and exclaiming “It’s half full!”. The second frame shows The Misery Guts, the pessimistic person, who stands in front of the glass with their shoulders sloping downwards and their face drooping, declaring in a dull monotone “It’s half empty”. The third person is The Scatter Brain, the confused and clueless person: the picture shows a confused looking person wringing their hands in existential dread and doubt, while stammering “... er ... it’s half full ... no ... it’s half empty ... er ... what was the question?”. Lastly, the fourth frame shows a big square-looking bloke standing in front of the glass with an angry expression on his face, his fists balled by his side, and he’s shouting out loud “I ordered a cheeseburger!”. He’s The Arsehole, the quintessential personality type that furnishes the vast majority of the world’s drug dealers, priests and politicians.

However, while these images are very entertaining they all miss the point. The real core of the matter is not the question of whether or not the glass is half full or half empty. The real nitty gritty of the matter is the fact that the glass is an astonishing product of human ingenuity: 5,500 years ago some clever dick in a dry and barren desert somewhere with a lot of time on his hands worked out that if you made sand really hot it melted into a liquid, and that this liquid could be manipulated into a shape that it kept when it cooled down. They figured out it could be moulded, and poured, and shaped, and blown, and worked, and could be turned into just about anything at all. They found that it could be formed into the shape of a glass that could hold liquid, and that if you held it up to the light the sun shone straight through it, dazzlingly and beautifully, creating the colours of the rainbow on the other side.

Even more astonishing than this mindblowing feat of human discovery and engineering, breathtaking though it is, is the fact that water can be poured into it and drunken from it. Water is the combination of two molecules of hydrogen with one molecule of oxygen, and in all its innocuous and unassuming simplicity it is the very thing that conditions life on earth. There is no life without water. Ultimately all life came from water, as life crawled out of the ocean and onto land, underwent myriads of evolutions and ended up here with us holding a glass of it in our hand and wondering whether we should be pleased about it or not.

And water is a beautiful, wonderful, amazing thing. It will hollow out, erode and wear down the hardest substances on earth, dig tunnels through rock and go where it wants. It will also, in some form or another, allow us to swim, bathe and shower in it, trickle it down our throats to keep us alive in any of a million of different drinks all of which are based on water, and ride, paddle and sail on it on surfboards and boats of any and all description. A human being without access to water will be lucky to survive for three days. All of humanity’s cleverness amounts to the square root of fuck-all if there’s no water to go along with it.

The fact that water exists in the first place is a matter of such sheer stupendous enormity that all we can really do is be thankful for it. So when we are presented with a glass with water in it, and would like to define ourselves and/or others as half-full or half-empty people, we are pissing into the wind. Instead we should marvel at the incredible feat of human creativity that is a piece of glass, of whatever shape, and at the sobering fact that we are lucky to have access to water and that we’d be dead without it. In other words, we should be overcome with joy at the notion of being alive to be able to behold such wonder, and, to boot, with a bit of luck, being able to see the sun rise and set and breathe air in between.

That is what really matters.

Furthermore, any given person, no matter where on earth they may find themselves, who can walk a kilometre in any direction, will be able to find a person who has no eyes to see the water with, who has no hands to hold the glass with, who has no ears to hear the water tinkle in the glass, who has no legs to walk to the water’s edge, and who can’t get out of their wheelchair to swim in the water of the creek, river, lake, billabong or ocean.

Any one single person who can do all of these things, no matter what their situation or condition in life in any other respect whatsoever, has got absolutely nothing to complain about, and should be jumping with joy at the very fact that they’re alive and in one piece.

So, if anyone who feels they have a bent for philosophical pondering approaches you and tries to wheedle some sort of half-arsed discussion out of you with the question “are you a glass half full or a glass half empty person”, grab the glass, throw the water in their face and smash the glass over their head, for being a pedantic twat.

Or, alternatively, for those less inclined towards physical violence and abuse, say what a friend of mine said when asked this question: “Half full or half empty? Who cares! Fill it up with wine!”.


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