@Daojoan Usually I agree with things you say in your articles, but I don't agree with this. For one thing, I think that maybe you're equating pessimism with defeatism in certain sections. Also, I think that some of your criticisms (especially the labelling "competitive pessimism") is more about the media than pessimism as a personal approach, if that makes sense.

I'd consider myself a recent convert to pessimism, inspired by Camus and the essay he wrote about pessimism being the moral choice. It ends with the line "consider Sisyphus happy," IIRC.

Just one other thing, and I think someone pretty much touched on it without giving a concrete example (talking about the precautionary principle), I don't think that the Y2K problem was solved by optimists. I think that it was pessimists that saw a problem, enumerated all the various reasons this could be very bad as well as the obstacles to achieving the required fixes, and then, turned that into action.

Actually one final, final thing, and that's that I appreciate that you do (IIRC) tease out differences between outlook (optimism vs pessimism) and the ideas of hope and action. I just believe that both of those are at least achievable by starting with a pessimistic view, and maybe (as I said, I'm a pessimist) that's an even better starting point than optimism. That said, both starting points can end up being an excuse not to hope or not to act. I don't have any problems with optimistic people (I don't consider it to be an automatic character flaw) but I think it might be worth considering the opposite view as well.