By default, most of us have taken the dare to simply survive. Exist. Get through. For the most part, we live numb to life - we've grown weary and apathetic and jaded... and wounded.
There's a good argument to be made that companies that are private, where they're run by partnerships, where everybody has true stake in them and they're not playing with other people's money, that by default it's a safer system, because you really have skin in the game. You really own the company.
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.
I'm famous by default. I came out of the womb, and people wanted to know who I was because of my parents.
I eventually made the reunion with my father that I'd used as a default daydream throughout my childhood, but by then, we'd both outgrown the only relationship we could have had to each other. I was over 30 by the time I met him again and no longer needed a father.
After everyone has had a chance to bluster, posture, and pontificate, we are left with one basic question: under any foreseeable circumstance, would it be in our national interest to default on our debt? The answer is unequivocally no.
Becoming a parent is always going to be a default setting. I truly believe there will always be more people who want to have children than who don't.
In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.
Pessimism is my default setting.
What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.