the euphoria of pessimism

Sometimes I’m asked if I’m a pessimist. I need to find a clever answer to this question. Or make up a good joke. But the truth is that I am a pessimist… except when writing about pessimism. I’ve managed to make pessimism a form of therapy.

“What can be usefully postponed can be even more usefully abandoned” (Epictetus).

“What prevents a work from being completed becomes the work itself.”

The more I talk to people, the less I see the point in conversation. I’ve often been in the midst of a conversation and have suddenly, unwillingly, been extracted mysteriously from it, as if I were observing the whole thing with a strange sense of detached melancholy, like an out-of-body experience.

Morbidity. I used to be afraid of exercising. That was before I was dealing with these health problems. Now I’m afraid of not exercising. The fear is the same.

like this – “not being able to wait” itself cannot wait. How, then, should we understand an instantaneous, on-demand, twenty-first-century, “global” culture such as ours, constituted almost exclusively by waiting? Waiting for the subway, waiting for lunch, waiting for a friend, waiting at the airport, waiting to be called, waiting to not hurt, wait

Nietzsche once defined “not being able to wait” as one of our most typically human qualities. In culture as in history, all tragedies and comedies are simply the result of someone not being able to wait. If Medea had simply taken the day off? If Hamlet had put things off for even longer? If Arjuna has called the whole thing off? But not being able

For optimists, the most perplexing question is how one becomes a pessimist – if one is not born one.

Nietzsche once described the pessimist as a clever person who has ruined their stomach so as to complain about the food,

To admire a misanthrope.