When you are counting on the future to unfold in a particular way, because your ability to orient yourself within it depends on its unfolding in that way, you become inclined to flip back and forth—to waver—between positive and the negative certainty,
Agnes Callard • Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life
most people are more optimistic about the future than the present. So they expect that things in their lives will be better down the road, including what is upsetting them right now.
Robert I. Sutton • The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt
Viewing the present from the future, or injustice from the perspective of justice, Thoreau must live in the uncomfortable space of the unrealized. But hope and discipline keep him there, oriented toward “a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.”
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Most people live their lives in between these 2 emotions-
1. Hope that if they achieve something, they will find happiness.
2. Fear that if they lose what they have, they will never be happy.
The day you understand neither of them are actually true is the day you are free.
Joe Hudsonx.comPerhaps there is a way through pessimism that leads to an adapted and more reasonable optimism—not the sort of delusional optimism that is ignorant to the somber truths of our condition, but rather, an optimism that exists in spite of it all.