It's Tempting to Believe the Pessimists

But it's short-sighted.

Hadleigh Castle by John Constable (Wikimedia Commons - public domain)

“The continuous and perpetual existence of the human race is merely proof of its exuberance and wantonness.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

We seem to give a lot of air time to pessimists.

The planet is going to burn up! Inflation is out of control! A recession is looming!

The thing is, we can look at data points that support their predictions—or at least the trends.

“The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.” — George Will

It’s all too easy to buy into the doom and gloom. Data, that sultry temptress, lures us into abandoning hope and believing that our future is in a downward spiral.

The reason pessimists sound smart is that their faith is based on certainty—in things that have already happened or things at which they can definitively point.

How unimaginative. How uninspiring.