5 Songs and 5 Movies that Help Define Me (as a Fatalistic Pessimist)

A Plethora of Pop challenge

Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash

The original challenge:

Writing Prompts: What Songs And Movies Define You?

Is self-definition possible?

Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

“You cannot define the truth of yourself within a given system while you’re in that system” (my feeble extrapolation of Tarski’s Undefinability Theorem). I.e. you can’t know the shape of forest while you’re amid the trees.

Two of my contradictory selves:

• A Cautious Optimist (“Life’s bad but I can change it)”
• A Fatalistic Pessimist (“Life’s bad and there’s nothing to do about it”)

The Fatalistic Pessimist rarely posts here — “what difference would it make?” while the Cautious Optimist characterizes most of my comments and stories on Medium. So to fill in the picture, I’m choosing five songs and five movies from my darker side. But the Pessimist isn’t…