Optimist? Pessimist? Realist? How about being all three?
ByKarishma Kuenzang
Aug 10, 2023 08:01 PM IST
It’s impossible to be strictly an optimist, a pessimist or a realist. So, why are we still living life confined by these categories?
“Are you an optimist, pessimist or a realist?” Seriously? It’s 2023. It’s possible to identify as non-binary, be proudly multilingual, be in the middle of two careers and four income streams. Why must we put ourselves into only one of three non-spill Tupperware boxes?
Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met (2017) has the full set: Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) is a pessimist, Geet (Kareena Kapoor Khan) is an eternal optimist, Anshuman (Tarun Arora), comes across as the most level-headed.
Too much optimism can be toxic too. Ellie Kemper plays the irrepressibly positive Kimmy Schmidt in the 2015 show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, despite escaping a traumatic past in which she was held in a bunker for years.