{"id":5858,"date":"2020-04-19T15:38:52","date_gmt":"2020-04-19T19:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/?p=5858"},"modified":"2020-04-19T15:38:52","modified_gmt":"2020-04-19T19:38:52","slug":"impossible-reading-response-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/2020\/04\/19\/impossible-reading-response-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Impossible Reading Response"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I tend to be more of a pessimist at heart, but in a way that fits with this reading. Just because I understand that there are more powerful forces than me at play won&#8217;t stop me from trying my hardest to accomplish something. In that way, I prefer to see myself as a realist, not a pessimist. Doing something is always better than doing nothing, so even if you&#8217;re not accomplishing 100% of what you want to accomplish, getting that 50% done is better than giving up.<\/p>\n<p>One thing the reading didn&#8217;t touch on that I thought fit well was the impact of perspective on expectations. I think it&#8217;s important to have realistic expectations. That does not necessarily mean optimistic or pessimistic, but rather a more frank acknowledgement of both the circumstances and our ability to change them. It is possible to understand that the situation is dire and also know that we have the agency to improve it. Having expectations from that perspective, rather than blindly optimistic or pessimistic, empowers us to work more productively towards our goals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I tend to be more of a pessimist at heart, but in a way that fits with this reading. Just because I understand that there are more powerful forces than me at play won&#8217;t stop me from trying my hardest to accomplish something. In that way, I prefer to see myself as a realist, not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4675,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4675"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}