Sean D. Francis

A Pessimist's Bucket List

Posted on 17 December 2009

25 Things a Pessimist Should Try Before They Die This is an older article but I found some of these things to be kind of intriguing. Some of these are tongue-in-cheek or apply to only the extreme paranoid pessimists, but here are a few that kind of made me smile.

1. Get out of bed with an excitement to start the day.
9. Buy a lottery ticket.
11. Use the nights you have insomnia to knit a scarf rather than ponder every mistake you’ve ever made.
17. Go to a party without expecting to hate it.
19. Show up at work without worrying you’re about to lose your job.
25. Just once, experience what it feels like to say: life is good.

I honestly can’t recall the last time I said ‘life is good’.  I don’t say ‘life sucks’ (often) but I rarely appreciate that life itself, its very nature, is good.  Of course I can’t see a list like this and not attempt to develop one of my own.

Ten other things a pessimist should do before dying

1. Order food for delivery and not expect the restaurant to send a driver who gets lost or brings the wrong food.

2. Use a credit card in a bar or restaurant without expecting one of the staff to copy the credit card number and buy a big screen TV with it.

3. Book a vacation somewhere and not think that it will be boring and pointless.

4. Start a new job without thinking that you aren’t capable of doing the work you were hired to do.

5. Take a road trip and not expect the car to break down midway.

6. Go ahead and tell that story without thinking that your are boring everyone in the room.

7. Take a class on something that interests you without thinking it is a complete waste of money.

8. Ask that cute person out without first thinking through the hundreds of ways it could go awry.

9. Start a project and stick to it to the end.

10. When something bad does happen don’t think “well that was expected” think “well that was unlucky.”

I fully admit some of these are personal obstacles that I’d like to overcome, but I have a feeling they are also universal to some degree.  Every pessimist experiences these in one form or another.