Adopt a Pessimist

I had an idea for a joke program, like Big Brother Big Sister, but it matches up pessimists with optimists. I made a few tweets about it.

This is a bit of a tongue in cheek cry for help. I’m a self-identified pessimist, but not one that wants to convert everybody to seeing things primarily from a pessimistic view. I only try to win people over to the pessimistic view when I think their optimism is just them looking through rose-colored glasses and maybe not seeing a thing that will harm them if they ignore it. It’s a bad habit I picked up from childhood shit and working in a field where I constantly had to be on the lookout for risks, and honestly, I am kind of desperate for more optimists in my life.

What I find, especially on Twitter, is this “good vibes only” thing. It’s also like, “oh, these pessimists, that’s just a skill issue, and really it’s their responsibility to fix that.” I think that doesn’t really do good things within the scene. Certainly, if somebody is being a pessimist in a way where they refuse to try to see things from the optimistic viewpoint or they’re just trying to drag everybody down — that’s not the scenario I’m talking about.

The scenario I’m talking about is where there’s a person who is prone to fretting over the possibility of bad outcomes who understands that that isn’t the only way to be but they have trouble breaking out of that frame. I think a lot of the time, pessimists are stuck in a hole and they bring up their fears, their worries, the risks that they see, not because they want to drag people down, but because they’re looking for soothing. And unfortunately, the only people who are poised to provide that soothing are optimists, because they’re the ones who see things that the pessimists cannot see — things that paint the situation in a more positive light.

There might be something to be said about optimist privilege, not to use some nasty woke term, but the pessimists, they got it kind of rough. They’re walking around seeing the world through really dark glasses, and the optimist sees all of this amazing possibility, so the optimist’s lived experience is going to be significantly more positive. It really does feel like sometimes as a pessimist that you just can’t see the light, you just can’t see the positive side of things. So who really can save you from yourself besides an optimist who is willing to subject themselves to your worries or your fears or your negative views? They might be the only people that can help.