As I write this the Raiders are a woebegone 12th on the table of the 16 NRL clubs and already seem to have a hailstone's chance in hell of achieving any glory this season.

Similarly, if it is character building to dream of and to vote in hope of a Labor federal government then Labor voters should by now have characters the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Labor has been in woebegone opposition in the Federal Parliament since the olden days of the 2013 election.

And my theme, the impact of lost causes on dreamers, has special poignancy for me at the moment because the lifelong object of my sporting affections, Norwich City Football Club, has just been relegated from the English Premier League for a record sixth time.

This is quite a flurry of relegations in quite a short time given that the Premier League (the pinnacle of UK football) has only a 30-year history.

My tragic and alas incurable devotion to Norwich City (the "Canaries") derives from my having grown up in Norwich's county of Norfolk (a childhood in weird Norfolk was character building in its own right) where I attended my first Canaries' game when I was just an urchin.

All football fans, everywhere, will testify to how these early embedded devotions last for ever and of course today's digital miracles of communications enable distanced fans (like this migrant, now living in this colony 19,000 kilometres from Norwich) are enabled to be virtually cheek-by-jowl with the objects of their fandom. I watch, live, Norwich's unhappy matches.

But when I think about the plights of the Raiders and the Canaries (and with as well the approach of election day rekindling memories of the stark tragedy of the satanic "miracle" of the election night of 2019) I wonder if perhaps our fraught fandoms may be a good thing.

What if these bruising fandoms, these allegiances of hard knocks, assist in the building of resilient emotional immune systems in much the same ways in which exposure to dirt is now shewn by medical science to be essential to the effectiveness of our body's immune systems?

Yes, a season of passionate engagement with one's Canaries and/or one's Raiders is an ordeal of disappointments and dashed expectations, but then life itself is demandingly difficult and demanding of so many emotional survival skills. I have never known what it is to wallow in the supporting of an ever-successful football team but suspect it must tend to turn out psychological sissies.

Meanwhile instead I sense my endurance of my Canaries' six relegations, of my Raiders' miscellaneous failures and my ALP's various federal election humiliations have helped bulk me up and make me the man I am. Yes I am wise, and it's wisdom born of pain.

Meanwhile those of us eternally pessimistic about the Canaries, the Raiders, the ALP (one feels sure that on election day God will intervene with another of His miracles, enabling Scomo the Christian to slither to victory) and about everything, might like to look on the bright side of pessimism.

In a new online piece Look On The Dark Side Maria van der Lugt a lecturer in philosophy at St Andrews University in Scotland urges that "we must keep the flame of pessimism burning: it is a virtue for our deeply troubled time, when crude optimism is a vice".

We have no room here to do her timely, scholarship-packed, 3500 word argument proper justice but in essence she argues that our choice is always not between utter despair and crude optimism. Instead, she says, let's embrace a "hopeful pessimism" as the proper spirit for our ghastly times. She points us to someone she fancies is a great role model.

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"Think of Greta Thunberg ... there is nothing positive or optimistic about Thunberg. If there is hope, it's a dark, bleak hope, full of rage and grief and pain for what is being lost - but infused also with insistence, endurance, determination. It is clear that this activist, at least, will continue to strive even if her efforts are doomed to fail. This is not optimism: if anything, it is a hopeful pessimism, and I believe it has every right to be called a virtue in our age."

"One can be deeply, darkly pessimistic, one can find oneself in the cold hard clutches of despair," the philosophy professor continues, "and yet not be depleted of the possibility [however slight] that better may yet arrive.

"This is a kind of hope that is dearly bought ... which may just be the acknowledgment of all the suffering that life can and does hold. If anything, the pessimists have taught me this: that with eyes full of that darkness there can still be this strange shattering openness, like a door cracked open, for the good to make its entry into life. Since all things are uncertain, so too is the future, and so there is always the possibility of change for better as there is for worse."

What stirringly sensible stuff this is! It is helpful whether applied to our smallish pessimisms (like the likelihood of a wretched season for the Raiders), our middle-sized pessimisms (the likelihood of the return of another accursed Morrison government) or the most gigantic pessimism of them all the likelihood that climate change will make our dear planet uninhabitable.