On pessimism, optimism and money

In my second read of “The Psychology of Money” by Morgan Housel and while writing my formal book summary I concentrated on why pessimism seems to rule over optimism in our day to day and even most in everything regarding money:

“For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell”. Historian Deirdre McCloskey

“Optimism is the best bet for most people because the world tends to get better to most people most of the time”. But “Pessimism just sounds smarter and more plausible than optimism”.

We’re programmed for pessimism. It’s evolution. It’s pessimists who survived the most.

Imagine a couple of hunter gatherers in the jungle, one of them a pessimist. The other an optimist.

When a bush moved, clearly indicating an animal was hiding there, the pessimist who always thinks it should be a tiger runs away ten out of ten times. So it’s still alive. The optimist who always thinks it should be a guinea pig only needs that 1 out of the 10 times it’s a tiger and not a guinea pig to be killed by the tiger.