Many Europeans who go to America have their heads turned by the sense of the possible. Gordon Brown, like Kate Winslet, looks transcendent with joy in the land of dreams. Brown was part Churchill part Kenneth Williams as he sunned himself before Congress and in President Obama's private rooms.

By contrast, a French-inspired internet forum called Vie de merde has been so successful that it has inspired an American version, F*** My Life, a black-humoured response to the jaunty election chant "Yes we can", and various other "loser" sites.

So is optimism or pessimism the best way of dealing with troubled times?

Brown has often been described as a pessimist, unlike Tony Blair, but he is as eager to solve the world's problems.

Indeed Brown has warned against pessimism, describing collapsing economies as the "difficult birth pangs of a new global order". It is the classic rhetoric of an optimist – rebirth, sunrises, spring.

George Osborne, from the party formerly known as optimistic, has accused the Government of a "leap in the dark" as a substitute for economic policy. To Brown, darkness is a journey into the light. But as Robert Lowell once put it, on behalf of the pessimists: "If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it is the light of the oncoming train."

Politicians and those in business have to believe that they can prevail, or they are out of a job. An acquaintance who left the Army for business said that it was interesting to see his new colleagues cheerfully discarding the past in favour of new beginnings. In his old life, he would have had to pick up the pieces. My view was that there was something to be said for the old life.

The reward for pessimism is that you avoid disappointment. At the moment, this is not a bad thing. Isn't it better to face the full horror of the banking system all in one go, rather than meted out month by month?

Are we not like Schopenhauer's lambs in a field "disporting themselves under the eye of a butcher"? Schopenhauer believed that misery and suffering were the natural order of things, rather than an aberration to be avoided. "A ship without ballast is unstable and will not go straight," he said.

Vie de merde is the ballast we need to correct the unconditional optimism of America. Maybe the French response of resignation and status quo is not "Old Europe" but "Wise Europe".

It is also funny. Success stories may be inspiring but they are rarely comic. An account of a fabulous holiday is far less interesting than one that went disastrously wrong. Why do you think columnists seem to have more accident-prone lives than the rest of the population? Because an account of seamless professional success and tickety-boo family life would be tiresome.

Schopenhauer said that the best consolation for misfortune is the thought of others in a worse plight. I don't think there is any satisfaction in reading of the suffering of Sudan, but slightly bad things happening to those within your frame of reference is certainly cheering. I much enjoyed a piece last week by Sir Max Hastings on his hopeless share investments.

The truth is that the poles of America and France form an equilibrium. It is good to look up, but we should also look down.

Sarah Sands is editor in chief of British 'Reader's Digest'