Debt... And optimism

Just finished reading "Boomerang" by Michael Lewis, felt it would give me some cultural insight into the Eurozone debt crisis. It did. The book ends with the following paragraph that I found very pertinent in many ways...

When people pile up debts they find it difficult and perhaps even impossible to repay, they are saying several things at once. They are obviously saying that they want more than they can immediately afford. They are saying, less obviously, that their present wants are so important that, to satisfy them, it is worth some future difficulty. But in making that bargain they are implying that when the future difficulty arrives, they'll figure it out. They don't always do that. But you can never rule out the possibility that they will. As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.