You Can Be Hopeful Without Being Optimistic
Published in
2 min readNov 4, 2020
Right now, roughly two years into this extremely long day, assuming the worst is the only thing many of us have the energy for. Psychologists call it “defensive pessimism:” the strategy of managing anxiety over an undesirable outcome by lowering expectations to meet it.
Defensive pessimism helps, sometimes, because it forces planning — in thinking through that awful hypothetical, what…
