This strategy, which I call pragmatic pessimism, also enables one to cope. Like pragmatic optimism, it also attempts to mitigate rather than exacerbate the human predicament. However, it is preferable to pragmatic optimism because it retains an unequivocal recognition of the predicament by not compartmentalizing it to coexist along with optimism. It allows for distractions from reality, but not denials of it. It makes one’s life less bad than it would be if one allowed the predicament to overwhelm one to the point where one was perpetually gloomy and dysfunctional, although it is also
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