The Necessary Struggle to Stay Optimistic

Sometimes in spite of all available evidence.

This has been one of those weeks in which you struggle to stay optimistic about the world. Optimism has long been a theme, perhaps the central motif, of my work and my career, and if you’ve met me on a personal level, you know it’s a part of walking-around meat-space me as well. Optimism gets a bum rap these days, portrayed either as either being a cheerful doofus or someone who lives with permanent privileged blinders on, a person who thinks because things have worked out for them, the only reason they don’t work out for others is because of their persistent negative attitude. But I’ve long argued that optimism isn’t just a choice — it’s the intelligent, reasonable one. None of us have nearly as much control over what’s going to happen as we wish or believe we do; something is going to happen, or it isn’t, and the universe decides it far more than we decide it. So you can either spend your life terrified (or even convinced) that a piano is going to fall on your head, or you can walk around believing that one never will. Neither approach is going to prepare you for the piano. But one of them will at least allow you to enjoy the time you have until it does.

I’ve written about this before in reference to the film Melancholia, in which a woman, played by Kirsten Dunst, who…