Her works have been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and many other prominent publications. You know, in some ways thinking negatively before we even know what’s going to happen, it’s just robbing us of that period of joy before we before we really know how something will turn out.ĮMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS Would you consider yourself a “self-protective pessimist,” or do you tend to imagine the best case scenarios? I’m Emiliana Simon-Thomas, the science director at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, filling in for Dacher Keltner this week. And we do love to be right, even if it’s about something negative. And if it doesn’t turn out well, well, then we were right. You know, we imagine the worst case scenario and we expect the worst because, on the one hand, if it turns out well, then we’re pleasantly surprised instead of disappointed. Ever since I was a child, I think I practiced what I would call ‘self-protective pessimism,’ which is something that so many of us do. I would probably call myself a recovering pessimist. ![]() I’m sure my own mother would have laughed. MAGGIE SMITH It’s funny, my daughter this year, in her Mother’s Day card wrote to me, “Thank you for helping me be optimistic.” And it made me cry, but it also made me laugh, because if you had told me even five years ago, but certainly 10 years ago, and definitely 15 years ago, that anyone would accuse me of being an optimist, I would have laughed.
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