The Pessimist's Advantage: Upsides of Expecting the Worst

The author promises that this is not a book about being miserable. The word pessimism has suffered a terrible reputation, largely at the hands of people who confused it with despair. These are not the same things. Despair is the absence of an agency. Pessimism, properly understood, is the exercise of it. One collapses; the other prepares. One gives up on the game; the other simply refuses to be surprised when the referee turns out to be incompetent, Pessimism offers a different deal. It does not promise you the world. It promises you something smaller, and in my view considerably more valuable: a realistic map of the terrain. And it turns out that people who carry accurate maps tend to navigate rather well.