would choose half full.]]

Pessimism, from the Latin word pessimus (worst), is a state of mind in which one perceives life negatively. Value judgments may vary dramatically between individuals, even when judgments of fact are undisputed. The most common example of this phenomenon is the "Is the glass half empty or half full?" situation. The degree in which situations like these are evaluated as something good or something bad can be described in terms of one's optimism or pessimism respectively. Throughout history, the pessimistic disposition has had effects on all major areas of thinking.

Philosophical pessimism is the similar but not identical idea that life has a negative value, or that this world is as bad as it could possibly be. It has also been noted by many philosophers that pessimism is not a disposition as the term commonly connotes. Instead, it is a cogent philosophy that directly challenges the notion of progress and what may be considered the faith-based claims of optimism.

Notable proponents

Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer's pessimism comes from his elevating of Will above reason as the mainspring of human thought and behavior. Schopenhauer pointed to motivators such as hunger, sexuality, the need to care for children, and the need for shelter and personal security as the real sources of human motivation. Reason, compared to these factors, is mere window-dressing for human thoughts; it is the clothes our naked hungers put on when they go out in public. Schopenhauer sees reason as weak and insignificant compared to Will; in one metaphor, Schopenhauer compares the human intellect to a lame man who can see, but who rides on the shoulder of the blind giant of Will.

Proof

Instead of asserting a personal opinion or viewpoint about the appearance of this world being the worst possible, such as a glass being half full or half empty, Schopenhauer attempted to logically prove it by analyzing the concept of pessimism.

He claimed that a slight worsening of conditions, such as a small alteration of the planet's orbit, loss of the use of a limb for an animal, and so on, would result in destruction. The world is essentially bad and "ought not to be".

Giacomo Leopardi

Types

Moral

Narratives of decline can be identified in morality: Friedrich Nietzsche's amorality, Freud’s description of co-operation as sublimation, Stanley Milgram shock experiments, the continued presence of war and genocide despite global interconnectedness, and the perceived exploitation of market fundamentalism or statism .

Intellectual

In ~400 BCE, pre-socratic philosopher Gorgias argued in a lost work, On Nature or the Non-Existent: #Nothing exists; #Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and #Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), characterized rationalism, and in particular Immanuel Kant's "critical" philosophy in order to carry out a reductio ad absurdum according to which all rationalism (philosophy as criticism) reduces to nihilism, and thus it should be avoided and replaced with a return to some type of faith and revelation.

Richard Rorty, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein challenge the sense of questioning whether our particular concepts are related to the world in an appropriate way, whether we can justify our ways of describing the world as compared with other ways. In general, these philosophers argue that truth was not about getting it right or representing reality, but was part of a social practice and language was what served our purposes in a particular time; to this end Poststructuralism rejects any definitions that claim to have discovered absolute 'truths' or facts about the world.

Political

It is not a trait of any political party to be pessimistic in and of itself. Conservative thinkers, especially social conservatives, often perceive politics in a generally pessimistic way. William F. Buckley famously remarked that he was "standing athwart history yelling 'stop!'" and Whittaker Chambers was convinced that capitalism was bound to fall to communism, though he was himself violently anti-communist. Social conservatives often see the West as a decadent and nihilistic civilization which has abandoned its roots in Christianity and/or Greek philosophy, leaving it doomed to fall into moral and political decay. Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gommorah and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind are famous expressions of this point of view.

Many economic conservatives and right-libertarians believe that the expansion of the state and the role of government in society is inevitable, and they are at best fighting a holding action against it. They hold that the natural tendency of people is to be ruled and that freedom is an exceptional state of affairs which is now being abandoned in favor of social and economic security provided by the welfare state. Political pessimism has sometimes found expression in dystopian novels such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Political pessimism about one's country often correlates with a desire to emigrate.

Environmental

Some environmentalists believe that the ecology of the Earth has already been irretrievably damaged, and even an unrealistic shift in politics would not be enough to save it. According to this view, the mere existence of billions of humans overstresses the ecology of the planet, eventually leading to a Malthusian collapse. The collapse will reduce the ability of Earth to support large numbers of humans for a long time into the future.

Cultural

Cultural pessimists feel the Golden Age is in the past, and the current generation is fit only for dumbing down and cultural careerism. Intellectuals like Oliver James correlate economic progress with economic inequality, the stimulation of artificial needs, and affluenza. Anti-consumerists identify rising trends of conspicuous consumption and self-interested, image-conscious behaviour in culture. Post-modernists like Jean Baudrillard have even argued that culture (and therefore our lives) now has no basis in reality whatsoever.

Psychology

The study of pessimism has parallels with the study of depression. Psychologists trace pessimistic attitudes to emotional pain or even biology. Aaron Beck argues that depression is due to unrealistic negative views about the world. Beck starts treatment by engaging in conversation with clients about their negative thoughts. Pessimists, however, are often able to provide arguments that suggest that their understanding of reality is justified; as in Depressive realism or (pessimistic realism). The Beck Hopelessness Scale has also been described as a measurement of pessimism.

Wender and Klein point out that pessimism can be useful in some circumstances: "If one is subject to a series of defeats, it pays to adopt a conservative game plan of sitting back and waiting and letting others take the risks. Such waiting would be fostered by a pessimistic outlook. Similarly if one is raking in the chips of life, it pays to adopt an expansive risk taking approach, and thus maximize access to scarce resources."

Criticism

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Pessimism is sometimes understood to be a self-fulfilling prophecy; that if an individual feels that something is bad, it is more likely to get worse.

Pragmatic criticism

Through history, some have concluded that a pessimistic attitude, although justified, must be avoided in order to endure. Optimistic attitudes are favored and of emotional consideration. Al-Ghazali and William James have rejected their pessimism after suffering psychological, or even psychosomatic illness. Criticisms of this sort however assume that pessimism leads inevitably to a mood of darkness and utter depression. Many philosophers would disagree, claiming that the term "pessimism" is being abused. The link between pessimism and nihilism is present, but the former does not necessarily lead to the latter, as philosophers such as Albert Camus believed. Happiness is not inextricably linked to optimism, nor is pessimism inextricably linked to unhappiness. One could easily imagine an unhappy optimist, and a happy pessimist. Accusations of pessimism may be used to silence legitimate criticism. The economist Nouriel Roubini was largely dismissed as a pessimist, for his dire but accurate predictions of a coming global financial crisis, in 2006. Personality Plus opines that pessimistic temperaments (e.g. melancholy and phlegmatic) can be useful inasmuch as pessimists' focus on the negative helps them spot problems that people with more optimistic temperaments (e.g. choleric and sanguine) miss.

Decay

Nietzsche believed that the ancient Greeks created tragedy as a result of their pessimism. "Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, degeneration, weary and weak instincts ... Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for the hard, gruesome, evil, problematic aspect of existence, prompted by well-being, by overflowing health, by the fullness of existence?"

Nietzsche's response to pessimism was the opposite of Schopenhauer's. "'That which bestows on everything tragic, its peculiar elevating force'" — he (Schopenhauer) says in The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, P. 495 — "'is the discovery that the world, that life, can never give real satisfaction and hence is not worthy of our affection: this constitutes the tragic spirit – it leads to resignation.' " How differently Dionysus spoke to me! How far removed I was from all this resignationism!"

See also

Cynicism

Whig history

Nihilism

Mood

Optimism

Optimism bias

Pessimism bias

Problem of evil

Theodicy

Blues

Notes

References

Dienstag, Joshua Foa, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, Princeton University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-691-12552-X

Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, New York: Vintage Books, 1967, ISBN 0-394-70369-3

External links

C-theory page

Category:Epistemology Category:Motivation Category:Ethical theories Category:Philosophy of life

Coordinates	47°26′59″N116°46′50″N
Name	Tim Ferriss
Birthdate	July 20, 1977
Birthplace	East Hampton, NY
Occupation	Writer
Genre	Fiction
Notableworks	The 4-Hour Workweek

Timothy Ferriss (born July 20, 1977) is an American author, entrepreneur, and public speaker. In 2007, he published The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, which was a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. In 2010, he followed up with The 4-Hour Body.

Early life

Ferriss grew up in East Hampton, NY and graduated from St. Paul's School. He received a degree in Neuroscience and East Asian Studies from Princeton University in 2000.

Career

In 2001, at the age of 23, Ferriss founded BrainQUICKEN, a San Jose-based online company that sells sports nutrition supplements. He sold the company in January 2009 to an unnamed London-based private equity firm. He is now a full-time angel investor and has invested in the following companies: Twitter, Posterous, DailyBurn (formerly Gyminee), Reputation Defender, Foodzie, Badongo, RescueTime, and SimpleGeo.

He also acts as an advisor to StumbleUpon and Shopify Ferriss and his dance partner Alicia Monti set the record live on the show Live with Regis and Kelly. Prior to his writing career, Ferriss wrote that he became the national champion in the 1999 USAWKF Sanshou (Chinese kickboxing) championship through a process of shoving opponents out of the ring. In 2008, he won Wired Magazine's "Greatest Self-Promoter of All Time" prize and was named one of Fast Company's "Most Innovative Business People of 2007". Ferriss has also spoken at the EG Conference.

His show Trial By Fire aired on the History Channel in December 2008. In the show, Ferriss had one week to attempt to learn a skill normally learned over the course of many years and in the pilot episode he practised the Japanese art of horseback archery, Yabusame.

The Aspen Institute named Ferriss a 2009 Henry Crown Fellow in March, 2009. The fellowship "is designed to engage the next generation of leaders in the challenge of community-spirited leadership". Ferriss was one of 21 individuals from the U.S. named.

Productivity and teachings

Ferriss is known for his application of both the Pareto principle and Parkinson's Law to business and personal life. He has also taken the position that technology such as email, instant messaging and internet-enabled PDAs complicate life rather than simplify it. His teachings fit under the umbrella of what he calls "lifestyle design", in which he promotes "mini-retirements" as an alternative to the "deferred-life" career path where one would work a 9-to-5 job until retirement in one's 60s. This involves breaking what he calls "outdated assumptions" and finding ways to be more effective so that work takes up less of people's time. He marketed the book heavily through bloggers with whom he created personal relationships. He has since been praised for this technique. The book eventually hit number 1 on both the New York Times bestseller list and the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

The release of his book moved Ferriss' blog to the Top 1000 on Technorati. Ferriss stated, in a Fast Company interview, that 4HWW is read by many of the "top tech CEOs in the world".

On December, 15 2009, The Four-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated was released by Random House in time for the holiday season, including several more case studies of people who have utilized Ferriss' methods.

The 4-Hour Body

On December 14, 2010, Ferriss' second book, The 4-Hour Body was published by Crown Archetype. The book reached the #1 position in the New York Times bestseller list that week in the Hardcover Advice & Misc. section.

References

External links

Tim Ferriss Blog

Four Hour Work Week Official Book Site

Problogger Interview: with Tim Ferriss

Former desk slave Tim Ferriss on why you only need to work a four-hour week from The Independent

Tim Ferriss: The Clock Watcher from The Daily Telegraph

Category:American bloggers Category:American business writers Category:American business theorists Category:American motivational writers Category:American Internet personalities Category:Life coaches Category:Technology evangelists Category:Princeton University alumni Category:1977 births Category:Living people Category:Angel investors