A philosophical stance or tendency to expect unfavorable outcomes; pessimism or the opposite of optimism.
From anti- (against) + optimism (from Latin optimum, meaning 'best'). As a philosophical term, it directly opposes optimism, which became popular in Enlightenment thinking.
While 'pessimism' is the common word for expecting bad things, 'antioptimism' makes it sound like a deliberate philosophical position against the optimistic worldview—which some 20th-century thinkers actually embraced!
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