{"id":1478,"date":"2009-03-07T13:02:55","date_gmt":"2009-03-07T21:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simonburrow.com\/\/?p=1478"},"modified":"2009-03-07T13:02:55","modified_gmt":"2009-03-07T21:02:55","slug":"defensive-pessimism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/?p=1478","title":{"rendered":"Defensive Pessimism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that one of my philosophical anchors &#8220;The key to happiness is low expectations&#8221; has a name it is called Defensive Pessimism.\u00a0 There was a short article about defensive pessimism in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oprah.com\/magazine\/omagazine\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>March edition of Oprah Magazine<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 It is defined as &#8220;a calculated form of negative thinking that can lead to very positive results.&#8221;\u00a0 One of the people interviewed is Julie K. Norem who has written a book:\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Positive-Power-Negative-Thinking-Defensive\/dp\/0465051391\/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1234748960&amp;sr=8-1\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><em>The Positive Power of Negative Thinking<\/em><\/strong><\/a> She wrote it in 2001 and it is still in print. I&#8217;ve ordered a copy on my Kindle.<\/p>\n<p>I was first introduced to the expression &#8220;The key to happiness is low expectations&#8221; by Arnie S.\u00a0 many years ago.\u00a0 He had heard it from a friend who was having trouble with offspring as: &#8220;The key to happiness is low expectations from <strong>your children<\/strong>.&#8221;\u00a0 I dropped the refrence to children and made it more general.\u00a0 Later Dave C. proposed to change it to &#8220;The key to happiness is low expectations <strong>of others<\/strong>.&#8221;\u00a0 But I stuck with the universal expression and it has served me well. I am almost never dissapointed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that one of my philosophical anchors &#8220;The key to happiness is low expectations&#8221; has a name it is called Defensive Pessimism.\u00a0 There was a short article about defensive pessimism in the March edition of Oprah Magazine.\u00a0 It is defined as &#8220;a calculated form of negative thinking that can lead to very positive [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-simon-says"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p99jGb-nQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1478"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1519,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478\/revisions\/1519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simonburrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}