neither failure nor success is a guarantee. Confidence in one’s abilities alone to reason through things is neither reasonable nor unreasonable.
With that stance, with one foot on either side of pessimism and optimism, a ‘lean’ in either direction is possible.
Given the choice of lean, I would allow confidence to give a little extra weight to the optimism side.
Yet, all that being said, I realized at one point that, for myself, I am a pessimist in optimist clothing, yet with ah optimist core, if that makes any sense at all.
At the core, I am an optimist. The impetus, my engine, is optimistic. Yet, it is surrounded by a pessimism that only comes out through my outward expression of optimism.
For me, it mitigates the excesses of either.
Is it the best way? I haven’t a clue. I think it’s just how I’ve wrapped up my optimistic core, by surrounding it with bullshit detectors, and coating it with a frosting of optimism as a social lubricant. Seems to get me through the day.