why would you call that pessimism? the fact of not being blindly optimist all the time does not mean you lie at the opposite extreme. it seems to me that focusing too much on your wishes or opinions about an event will prevent you from seeing it and acting on it in an autonomous way. our opinions and feelings are impressions, they are models presented to us by our minds to guide us into action. usually, taking these models for facts is something we need in order to act effectively without second thoughts. usually, the mind reads the situation and presents us, not with an objective statement about reality, but with a practical guide for action which is in harmony with the context. the thing is that this function of pattern-perception and model-creation is perfectly adapted to nature, but in this man-made world full of contradictions and static tendencies, this function gets lost or overused.

this is why we need to make an extra effort, not just to follow or reject our impressions, but to be aware of how they arise and how they guide us, because if we overlook this process we will, as time passes, reach areas not adapted to human life, and this will foster inhuman actions, the worst of it being that they will seem the right thing to do. thus, being a ‘realist’ rather than a pessimist or an optimist, is not so much analyzing rationally the world-out-there to act effectively on it, but rather being aware of how the human entity adapts to its environment, the devices used in this process, and the role of these in the generation of those models we experience as life itself, in the emergence of that which we call reality and that makes a shared life possible.