"An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves"
About this Quote
New Year’s optimism gets romanticized as a moral trait; Bill Vaughan punctures that balloon by making optimism and pessimism look like two versions of the same sleepless compulsion. The joke turns on a neat mirror: both people stay up until midnight, but one frames the vigil as arrival, the other as escape. Vaughan’s intent isn’t to crown one temperament as healthier. It’s to expose how easily we dress up anxiety as worldview.
The optimist “to see the new year in” sounds celebratory, even cinematic, but it’s also a bid for control: if you’re awake to witness the threshold, you get to believe the future is something you can greet. The pessimist “to make sure the old year leaves” is darker and funnier because it treats time like an unwanted guest who might overstay. That phrasing smuggles in a suspicion that bad luck is sticky, that the past has inertia, that endings require supervision.
As a mid-century American journalist, Vaughan wrote in a culture steeped in progress-talk, salesmanship, and calendar-based reinvention. His line plays like a newspaper-age antidote to cheery slogans: a reminder that attitudes are often rhetorical costumes for the same underlying restlessness. The subtext is slyly democratic: we’re all waiting at midnight, narrating the moment in whatever language lets us feel less vulnerable to it.
The optimist “to see the new year in” sounds celebratory, even cinematic, but it’s also a bid for control: if you’re awake to witness the threshold, you get to believe the future is something you can greet. The pessimist “to make sure the old year leaves” is darker and funnier because it treats time like an unwanted guest who might overstay. That phrasing smuggles in a suspicion that bad luck is sticky, that the past has inertia, that endings require supervision.
As a mid-century American journalist, Vaughan wrote in a culture steeped in progress-talk, salesmanship, and calendar-based reinvention. His line plays like a newspaper-age antidote to cheery slogans: a reminder that attitudes are often rhetorical costumes for the same underlying restlessness. The subtext is slyly democratic: we’re all waiting at midnight, narrating the moment in whatever language lets us feel less vulnerable to it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Optimism |
|---|---|
| Source | Bill Vaughan , quote listed on Wikiquote: "An optimist stays up to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves." |
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