The Realism Of Pessimists

Linda Besner looks at a study of humanity's innate optimism:

Even in my airplane behaviour, though, there’s a seed of optimism: I always wear my contacts so I can swim to safety if we crash into the ocean. (If I were actually involved in the spectacular fireball of a plane crash that’s scrolling through my imagination, I would almost certainly be too dead to benefit from corrective eyewear.) I picture a scenario in which the probability of survival is incredibly low, and then class myself among the minority of people who survive, instead of the majority who end up at the bottom of the ocean.This kind of thinking is what dominates our predictions: we believe ourselves to be exceptional. Even thinking of myself as more pessimistic than everyone else is rather self-regarding: if optimists make up 80 percent of the population, why do I think I’m so special? In all likelihood, I’m as blind to my own optimism as other people are to theirs; that’s why they call it a bias.
But our illusions are what keep us going. Sharot’s research into the optimism bias has generated evidence to suggest that this persistent tendency to picture ourselves as special cases, immune to the bad things in life and disproportionately favoured with the good, is a basic function of the brain. One of the significant differences, as far as we know, between humans and other animals, is our capacity to project our spectral selves through time—to imagine a past and a future. Our ability to imagine a future has helped us to use tools, build civilizations, and domesticate other animals, but it comes with quite a catch: it also made us aware of our own mortality. When the best-case scenario is that we will all get old and die, and so will everyone we’ve ever loved, optimism isn’t a choice—it’s a necessity.
For humans to conquer life’s despair long enough to reproduce, we need to be able to ignore much of what we learn. As Sharot puts it, “the knowledge of death had to emerge at the same time as its irrational denial.” Unreasonable optimism is how we accept the human condition.

One of the findings is that pessimists are more likely to accurately predict outcomes, because they are more realistic.  I'm guessing that I fall into the pessimist category, even if I'm not highly accurate in predictions.