Word: pessimist
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...loner really become more gregarious through acts-of-kindness exercises? Can a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist learn to see the glass as half full? Can gratitude journals work their magic over the long haul? And how many of us could keep filling them with fresh thankful thoughts year after year? Sonja Lyubomirsky believes it's all possible: "I'll quote Oprah here, which I don't normally do. She was asked how she runs five miles a day, and she said, 'I recommit to it every day of my life.' I think happiness is like that. Every...
...Sometime next year, those Red Line subway cars will move out for the last time, and instead of screeching wheels at 1:20 in the morning, jackhammers at 7 a.m will awaken Eliot House residents. And in a few years -- three to the optimist, five or more to the pessimist -- the scenery should be a little better, when the John F. Kennedy Library graces the Charles River's banks...
...Sometime next year, those Red Line subway cars will move out for the last time, and instead of screeching wheels at 1:20 in the morning, jackhammers at 7 a.m will awaken Eliot House residents. And in a few years -- three to the optimist, five or more to the pessimist -- the scenery should be a little better, when the John F. Kennedy Library graces the Charles River's banks...
...universalist religion of humanitarianism and human rights--a faith without borders, like globalization, or like communism in the old days--has its optimists, who imagine a future of triumphant international decency, and its pessimists, who think expecting people to be nice is a mug's game. David Rieff is a pessimist--a gloomy pessimist at that. At the end of his ruthlessly lucid book A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Simon & Schuster; 367 pages), Rieff, with disconsolate satisfaction, quotes Alberto Navarro, former director of the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office, as saying, "Mankind is slowly...
People often ask if I am an optimist or a pessimist about our future. I answer that I'm cautiously optimistic. We face big problems that will do us in if we don't solve them. But we are capable of solving them. The risk we face isn't that of an asteroid collision beyond our ability to avoid. Instead our problems are of our own making, and so we can stop making them. The only thing lacking is the necessary political will...