In Praise of Pessimism

Confession: I have a secret talent for making lemons out of lemonade. It may not be readily apparent. I smile a lot and make cheerful conversation; my end of the dinner table is not some horrible event horizon beyond which all sunlight disappears. But tucked inside me, almost always, is a grumbling Eeyore.

That Eeyore is having her moment. The coronavirus is springtime for pessimists. Every gloomy thought I’ve had about this pandemic has more or less come to pass. So when I read of a possibly more devastating wave of Covid-19 this coming winter, or that recovered patients in South Korea are suddenly becoming reinfected, or that a vaccine might take north of 18 months to develop and mass produce, I merely think Welcome to my brain. Those are the lyrics of my personal death-metal soundtrack. They’ve been playing in my head all along.

In the coming months, all of us are going to have to figure out how to gird ourselves psychologically for whatever the new normal might be. “Optimism tempered by realism,” tends to be the favored formulation, and sure, that’s fine; it may even be politically and economically sound.

But I’d also like to make a positive case for pessimism. Defensive pessimism, specifically. Because if things start going downhill, defensive pessimists will be the ones with their feet already on the brakes.

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“Defensive pessimism is costly in that it doesn’t get rid of your anxiety,” Julie Norem, a professor of psychology at Wellesley College, told me. “But the flip side is that it keeps your mind anchored and focuses you on things you can control.” Which is what distinguishes it from generalized anxiety, garden-variety neuroticism and catastrophizing, by the way. Defensive pessimism is productive.

Norem, who’s been studying defensive pessimism since the early 1980s, told me that she collected her most recent round of data on March 20 — eight days after the World Health Organization deemed Covid-19 a pandemic, but before all but one state, California, had begun enforcing stay-at-home orders. The correlation was clear: The more defensively pessimistic her participants were, the more likely they were to be canceling travel and avoiding public gatherings — or to have done so already.

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You could argue that pessimism is, at this moment, not just sensible but pro-social. Last month, when I read that 75 percent of all neighborhood restaurants will likely shutter for good, I bought pastries for my neighbors from the one local bakery I couldn’t bear to see disappear. (I recommend doing this in your own neighborhood, if you’re still lucky enough to have disposable income. It’s win-win-win.) Because I assumed the worst, I actually got off my duff and did something. I can only hope I’ll have the wherewithal to do the same going forward.

“I think the edge a defensive pessimist might have when the economy reopens,” Norem wrote me in another email, “is that they will continue to take more precautions than non-defensive pessimists, and they’ll prepare for the open/close/open/close roller coaster that many people are predicting. They’re more likely to plan for different contingencies and scenarios, and thus less likely to be caught off guard by any particular one.”

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Read the whole story (subscription may be required): The New York Times