Skip to content
Pathfinding
Blog

Prufrock: In defense of pessimism

Prufrock: In defense of pessimism

Section titled “Prufrock: In defense of pessimism”

Metadata

Section titled “Metadata”

Highlights

Section titled “Highlights”
  • As an occasional armchair pessimist, I would put it a little differently. Pessimism for me is not about claiming to hope for nothing while secretly hoping for something—or even less about gathering the “wild power” of pessimism into a “strange alchemy of hope.” Ugh. It’s about rejecting the question of whether the world will get better or worse completely. What do “better” or “worse” even mean, and how can I know when something is getting better since I live at a fixed point in time and can’t possibly know the long-term consequences of any of my actions? Protesting child labor in China seems like a good thing until you learn that the alternative to working in a factory for a lot of these kids is living on the street. Pie-in-the-sky questions like “How can I make the world a better place?” are of negligible value when it comes to living a good life. It is better to focus on living rightly in the present regardless of outcome. Sometimes, of course, you have to take into account what the outcome of a decision might be to help determine what the “right” thing to do is. Sure. But this happens a lot less frequently than people think and is usually of limited value in a world as contingent as ours.
    • Tags: #favorite