Someone who is pessimistic

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Optimistic , pessimistic , and their related words are all about different views of the same situation: being optimistic is seeing the glass as half full, and being pessimistic is seeing the glass as half empty. Remember, an optim istic person expects good things to happen—maybe even an optim al outcome. A pessimistic person expects bad things to happen.

Whether you need one-on-one or group study sessions, Dictionary Academy tutoring is custom-fit to meet your learning needs. Feedback We've Added New Words! Word of the Day. Meanings Meanings. What Does Pessimistic Mean? Optimistic Vs. Pessimistic Learn With A Tutor. A pessimistic person is a downer. Who cares if it's raining money? They'll never get any. Optimistic people see the best in the world. Optimistic ideas have been around for a while — Voltaire's "Candide" mocked them thoroughly.

Here's an optimistic quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. You're saying, "What is Seligman saying that I can use, or write about? And so, the notion that we should live more and more in the moment denies what, evolutionarily, we're really good at.

What distinguishes human beings from all of the other animals is that we're creatures of the future. I'm not impressed by our wisdom and knowledge. But I am impressed [by] how much of our mental life is about the future. I've come to think of us as Homo prospectus. This is what human beings are good at, and it's why we dominate the planet. Not because we live in the moment. I've read a few people have said that you might be better off cultivating a sort of non-attachment to well-being: be mindful that a lot of life is going to be suffering, and if you can find contentment in that, you might be better off than seeking out happiness.

I think the good thing about meditation—mindfulness, concentrating on the present, detaching—is as good anti-anxiety, anti-anger tools. But one of the costs of accepting fate, accepting that you can't go on and do something good in the future, correlates highly with physical illness, shorter life span, less accomplishment at work.

So, it's a good anti-anxiety tool often, but it's got a lot of costs as well. A lot of it depends on what you care about. So, I meditated 40 minutes a day for 20 years. And what that did, essentially, was to cure my anxiety.