Here are some sage and sobering reflections from Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine and Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, in response to an interview question about how to maintain realistic expectations amid the contemporary cult of optimism and positive thinking: INTERVIEWER: Today the cult of…
Tag: pessimism
Teeming Links – August 2, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I invite you to peruse today’s offering of necessary and recommended reading under the overarching emotional/conceptual rubric of this recent rumination about the extreme value of ambivalence and undecidedness amid our present sociocultural circumstance of frenetic and manipulative opinion-peddling and belief-mongering: We live in a society in which…
Gloom Is Good: The Rise of the New Pessimists
“Greed is good,” Gordon Gekko told us in 1987 (echoing and perhaps parodying Ayn Rand‘s long-running, uber-egoistic economic cant). For all we know, he may be gearing up to deliver us a repackaged version of the same message later this year when Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps hits theaters. But regardless of what Gekko’s…
Learning the value of pessimism from ancient Stoics and Christians
Here’s the perfect reality check for all of the current ill-conceived hopes for a swift economic “recovery,” defined as a return to our previous bubblicious state of unfettered (and, as it turned out, fake) economic growth and “greed is good”-induced cultural mania: “For a happier life, shake off your misplaced optimism” — Financial Times, April…