could you be more specific, maybe give an example? i doubt most cynics believe they're being cynical, only realistic. how would you gauge whether one's perspective is realistic or overly pessimistic (or optimistic for that matter)?
Say you start a business and you fail miserably. You can chalk this up to experience and try again or you can go back to working for someone else, strongly convinced that you're a loser who should never have taken the entrepreneurial plunge. Actually, venture capitalists would rather invest in someone who failed once and is trying again because they assume that a lot of useful experience comes of failure, particularly including what not to do next time.
I believe that the difference between the two possibilities is one of attitude. The realist assesses chance objectively and knows that the probability of success increases through patience and persistence. This is something that some people naturally know from a young age, but most people learn by experience (if they ever learn it). Those who don't know this are either overly optimistic, idealistic innocents or older pessimists who quit too soon and never tried again. They protect themselves psychologically by becoming cynical.
Grafted upon (or beneath?) the experience thing is one's basic temperament (not meant in the MBTI way). People seem to be born naturally optimistic, pessimistic or somewhere between. If we assume that there is a spectrum among the population of older people ranging from pessimistic (cynics) to optimistic, with a non-bimodal distribution, it would be reasonable to guess that the average is found somewhere in the "middle" which we would call "realistic." If this were a symmetric distribution such as a bell curve (which it probably isn't--few things are), then we would expect most older people to be realists.
Determining whether an individual is realistic, pessimistic or optimistic is best done in context and retrospectively. But, for the person who wants to develop a means of moving forward in life, talking with a variety of experienced (older) people can't hurt. As a young engineer just beginning my career, I was lucky to know older, experienced engineers from whom I learned more my first year out of school than any professor I had had. Another thing to keep in mind when assessing someone's location on the pessimism-optimism spectrum is that these things are relative. Risk takers (adrenaline junkie) are going to see things quite differently than accountants (unless the accountants are really criminals).
With age comes experience. Another way of saying this is that the longer you're around the more data you get to collect, sample and react to. Considering that both good and bad experiences happen, over time, you're likely to regress to the mean. That is, if we are considering a sufficiently large population of people. Individuals, as we all know, can be outliers, or, in other words, royal pains in the ass.
Please note that what I've written is just my current opinion (an INTP's working hypothesis), which has been known to change under the influence of a better idea or whim.
