"The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly either proven right or pleasantly surprised"
George Will
A person who believes that only pessimism or cynicism equals realism, lacks realism.
I wonder if optimism and pessimism are part of an unconscious mechanism of survival of the specie, like right-y and left-y brains. In a sense that they come up with different solutions to a same problem, or react differently, and that they can either prove to be right or wrong and hypothetically save 50% of the people in the most extreme situations.
Say a group of HGs are trapped in a forest fire. They're hiding in a hole. Either the pessimists or optimist believe that they should wait for the forest fire to stop and stay protected in their hole, while the others disagree and think that if they make the run for it, they will live. At the end of the day, the optimists or pessimists who stayed in the hole turned into roasted pork chops, and those who ran from the fire get to live another day.
If these people were all pessimists or optimists, they would've either all made it, or would've all burned to death.
