Dr. Ellen Langer

So you're out there in the world being.

When you're pessimistic, you cut yourself off more or less.

You see everything is negative.

And that's very important.

You have these people who are called defensive pessimists.

So they're always, you know, prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.

But hope is interesting.

Talk to me about hope.

Okay.

I love language.

So hope sounds good, right?

Hope is certainly better than being hopeless.

Yes.

But when I get up in the morning and I go into the kitchen, I don't hope there's going to be coffee.

So again, hope also has built into it a negative expectation.

I know that there's going to be, and if it turns out there isn't, all right, so what?

I'll deal with it.

But to believe in all these negative things is a burden.

So the defensive pessimist, you see, when you recognize that things in and of themselves are neither positive or negative, when you're defensively pessimistic, you're seeing the negative, right?

And that's going to have an effect on you.