“ I am forced to be an optimist. Because I am alive. To be a pessimist is to have agreed that human life is an academic matter.”

James Baldwin

Pessimism. Seeing the worst of things. Generally the term is used to describe one who foresees negative outcomes. But, from my experience interacting with pessimists, most prominently myself, I’ve come to challenge the modesty of this description.

If pessimism is only directed toward the future initially, it will inevitably spread like a virus onto every part of life. Out of kindness — or spite, perhaps — , pessimism doesn’t discriminate by time. Poor eyesight doesn’t only hinder my looking forward. With that expectation, I’ll be mightily shocked when I look backwards. In this way, pessimism is most obviously seen by witnesses as an attitude toward the future. Negativity is most casually displayed through conversations about prospective events.

Nevertheless, one who looks forward with shit-coloured glasses would need incredible dexterity to swap in the rosy kind when turning backward. We forget that we must interpret our past just the same. Did I make the right decision,? Did I give a good impression? Does she like me? Was the 1000$ bouquet a little much?

It also, in my experience, brings all experience down to negativity. When de Botton speaks of pessimism, he means it in the stoic sense. Lower your expectations. But of course, if you were truly pessimistic, you could scarcely live with yourself. In fact, it’s hard to see how, seeing the worst in things, you could live at all.

You may think, those of you that are so fortunate, that I’m exaggerating my claim. Nobody could be so pessimistic they’d renounce life, surely! Well, you lucky fellas, let me tell you.

Suicide is pessimism taken to its logical end. That’s not to say that suicide itself is a logical decision, I’ve never heard of a level-headed suicide attempt. Suicide, from my proximity to — thankfully — second-hand accounts, is a profoundly emotional act. But once the feeling of pessimism as flown from your brain into your veins, into your heart, and into your gut, suicide is the only option. If nothing will turn out for the better, and you feel terrible, and you’ll always feel terrible, how can there be anything left within you but despair? There is, to the true pessimist, only one barrier to suicide: fear.

That’s my assessment. Now, my description of pessimism is quite alien to yours. I am not describing the intellectual state of pessimism, but the true feeling, the incarnation of pessimism, the living pessimism, which we so often see in the depressed. We, in fact, sometimes diagnose them through an judgment of their pessimism.

What of casual pessimism, then? Casual pessimism is pessimism taken lightly. There’s someone incredibly edgy, phony about it all. “The world sucks, man”, says the teenager. “It’s all just a sham”, he continues, on the verge of nihilism.

And yet, his convictions would seem perfectly genuine if it were not for the total inconvenience of the simple fact that they are alive. The true pessimist doesn’t bitch about the world, he escapes it. And if the thought hasn’t crossed your mind in earnest, even if it was immediately discarded, as if you’d opened the page of an illustration in a horror novel, only to quickly shut it closed, then you have not experienced through pessimism.

To be a pessimistic and be alive to tell the tale — to the immense displeasure of everyone around you — you must then discard your feelings as a whole, and consider the matter purely intellectually.

“I am a pessimist, I judge life to be terrible, though I do not feel it to be so. In fact, I haven’t felt anything since I was about 16.”

When Baldwin writes that he’s an optimist because he’s alive, he means that to live requires hope. To be truly pessimistic is to try to escape feeling, all too often through suicide. But to “reduce human life to an academic matter” is to shut down your heart and accept yourself as a walking brain, seeing people as data and outcomes as negative, with as much vibrant vivacity as Schopenhauer’s cold corpse.

Tell me, my friend, to remove your feelings and become a mind, a mind without hope of anything good, is that not also, in its way, to be dead? What is the difference between burying a corpse and burying your heart?

Such is the unfortunate end of pessimism. While true pessimism is often deemed noble, valuable and intelligent, it is above all unwise. It is the outlook of the dead, or the ‘might-as-well-be’ dead. To see all that is dark, gray, and painful, experience nothing the cold suppression of grief, despair and fear, is not a desirable state. It’s a tragic road, to be sure. The purpose of my writing is to show that it’s a road to be avoided, not one to be romanticized.

As long as you live, something that shouldn’t be taken for granted, nor thrown away prematurely, you do so with a vibrancy. And of those who suffer the greatest pain, the most noble are not those who let up, but those whose eyes glitter in the reflection of a brightness hidden. And, the inconvenience of life is that you are condemned to be one of these nobles as long as you live. So long as the eyes see, no matter how dark, there is light.