If he's at mainline, I think that counts as optimism for him.

Sometimes I lurk old posts on this forum from around 2009 when airlines were reacting to the last major crisis and something I've noticed is that when anxieties start kicking up among mainline pilots, a small minority turn to soothing themselves by fantasizing about how much worse other people have it and how they're doing relatively well. Regional pilots are an obvious target for this therapeutic activity.

Just to be clear, I don't think this is a mainline behavior so much as it's a boomer behavior and mainline airlines have a higher proportion of those.