Cautious optimism

Optimism is being challenged on multiple fronts. First in the literal sense; we definitely have a lot of stuff to be decidedly un-optimistic about in our current political, tech, and climate… climates. But people are also pushing back on the term itself, and the idea it represents in the first place. Every second podcast I listen to, and book I read, wants to tell us that optimism is the blind belief that things will “just get better” irrespective of what we do. This is contrasted with pessimism, which is presented as the belief that things will “just get worse” in the same way. They’re seen as two sides of the same coin. We have no agency, and we’re letting the world decide our future for us. It’s a passive belief, and ultimately self-defeating. I don’t agree, at least not entirely. We could get into the weeds of German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s position that we’re living in the best of all possible worlds; a concept with which I was obsessed as a teenager. But while…