the.com/realist
Someone who calls it pessimism's sober cousin but drinks the same thing.
means A person who insists on seeing things as they actually are rather than how they wish them to be, especially when judging what's likely to happen.
from From 'real,' traced back through French 'réel' to Late Latin 'realis' — 'relating to things' — built on Latin 'res,' meaning 'thing' or 'matter.' The '-ist' suffix, borrowed from Greek '-istes,' turns the adjective into a person who practices or believes in something. So a realist is, at root, simply 'one devoted to things as they are' — the word later picked up philosophical weight in debates over whether abstract ideas or material things are the truer reality, before settling into its everyday sense of the clear-eyed skeptic.
- self-label
- nobody calls themselves an idealist after age twelve
- favorite move
- lowering expectations and calling it wisdom
- secret tell
- always right in hindsight, rarely useful in advance
- origin
- philosophy term hijacked to excuse giving up early