The Struggles Of Being An Eternal Pessimist

It’s hard to stay positive when we’re stressed and life is disappointing so often. While we do realize it could always be worse, eternal pessimists live with these daily struggles:

1. We don’t get excited very often. Getting excited usually leads to disappointment, or at the very least, we agonize over all the ways that it could. Getting truly excited means letting our guards down, and, well, nothing good can come of that.
2. We always anticipate disappointment. Those of us who are part of the pessimist club are always considering ways in which a person or an event will be disappointing to us. We’ve often faced a lot of disappointment over the years, and therefore we constantly come to expect it as a way of life. No matter how well something appears to be going, we pick it apart to figure out where it will go wrong.
3. We struggle to enjoy the happy times. We enjoy being happy as much as the next person, but actually staying happy? That’s a completely different story. It’s hard for us to stay in the moment with those positive feelings because we’re always waiting for the ball to drop. Again, the anticipation that something will go wrong definitely prevents us from just enjoying a good thing.
4. People complain that we’re always negative. We all have a few positive friends to offset our pessimism, but those positive friends can’t help but point out how negative we are. Sometimes they think we’re funny in a cute, quirky way, but most times they can’t help but try and make us leave the dark side and enter their world.
5. We struggle to give people the benefit of the doubt. While an optimist is usually quick to trust people or at least give them the benefit of the doubt, those of us who are pessimists struggle to not constantly doubt people. Whether we don’t trust their intentions or we’re just afraid we’ll be let down, we usually find some sort of reason to be skeptical, at least initially. Once we do trust someone, they’ve definitely earned it.
6. We find something wrong with most things. No matter how perfect a person or thing might be, we can pretty much always find something wrong with it. It’s not that we set out to be critical or to ruin things, but we just seem to find little things that could have been better. Despite our findings, the polite pessimists are good at keeping it to ourselves and faking positivity so as to not be rude.
7. We don’t enjoy things the way our friends do. Wouldn’t it be nice to just see things in a totally positive light, without waiting for everything to come crashing down? We just aren’t built that way, and can’t enjoy the simple things the positive people take for granted. We have a hard time just sitting back and going with the flow because we are always thinking ahead to various disastrous scenarios. We are natural born catastrophists, and we just can’t help it.
8. We usually dread things the positive people get excited about. Because we anticipate things going wrong and always see the negative side of things, we usually kind of dread things that we should be excited about. While part of us doesn’t want to go, the other part of us would also be annoyed if we missed it and felt left out, so the internal battle we face is a fun one.