In Defense of Optimism

America is not a happy place. The prevailing national mood, particularly among young people, is alarmingly negative. A 2019 Pew Research poll found that nearly three-quarters of US adults under thirty “see others as selfish, exploitative, [and] untrustworthy,” continuing a decades-long downward trend in Americans’ confidence in each other. Poll after poll has shown that Americans are generally unhappy with the present and pessimistic about the future. Young people especially are inclined to believe that things have never been worse. And this attitude is increasingly reflected in our behavior towards others.

Everyone knows America’s social fabric is eroding. Bad behavior is no longer socially penalized like it once was; too often it is rewarded. Politicians feel they have more to gain by outdoing each other in shamelessness. Airlines have had to contend with skyrocketing incidents of unruly passengers. Teachers have fled the profession in part because of unmanageable classrooms. The crime rate is still depressingly high across the nation. 

No arena of public life is safe from the new American malaise. Social media has become an especially grim place. The memes young people create and share are telling. Many of them are mean-spirited, angry, sardonic. One I saw recently was of a man gleefully crawling into bed with the caption: “What would you do if you knew you would not wake up in the morning?” Perhaps the defining meme of the past decade is a cartoon dog sitting in a room that is on fire and declaring: “This is fine.” If memes, like television and literature, reflect cultural sentiments—and I believe they do—then all signs point to a culture that is in serious trouble.

I often find myself in conversations with young people who think this way, students and friends gripped by a troubling attitude of despair, anger, and nihilism. Despair for a world that seems to be coming apart at the seams, an economic system that no longer benefits them, a political system that does not reflect their values. Anger at the perceived injustices of a cruel, uncaring, unsympathetic culture. Nihilism in their rejection of moral and ethical principles as relics of a corrupted past. 

I leave these conversations convinced that my sunny disposition is indefensible. To project optimism in these dark times is almost an insult, a willful Pollyannaish indifference to the chaos enveloping our lives. Wars in Europe and the Middle East, a warming planet, decimated ecosystems, obscene economic and social inequalities, threats of autocracy, an epidemic of loneliness, rising deaths of despair… All around one sees a world gone askew. Things are not working. Who wouldn’t want to curl up on the couch and doom-scroll?

Some want to defend these attitudes and behaviors as normal reactions to trying times. But I am not convinced. In an era of self-obsession and culturally sanctioned narcissism where the limits of the known universe begin and end with “me,” any mindset can be justified as an act of “self-care” or “self-expression.”

We should ask ourselves what anger, despair, and nihilism actually do to us. Well-being does not exist on a flat line. If human flourishing and personal fulfillment are the goals, there are better and worse ways to conduct one’s life. What if instead of reaching instinctively for the negative, we shift our perspective?

Surely there is more than enough suffering in the world. Why add our own to the pile? “We betray ourselves into smallness,” wrote Helen Keller, “when we think the little choices of each day are trivial.” With every mean-spirited retweet, every cynical declaration, every chip we don’t brush off our shoulder, we make ourselves that much smaller. We smother the light that flows pure and unencumbered from our souls. 

I don’t mean souls in the strictly religious sense. I don’t believe one needs to be religious to grasp the concept of a soul. It is the thing within each of us that makes our lives invaluable. It is the source of our inherent dignity as beings on this planet, the place where our loves and passions come from. A painter pours his soul onto the canvas; a writer pours his soul onto the page; a mother pours her soul into the lives of her children. For the religious among us, it is that inviolable spark of God within every person. 

Too many people these days, intentionally or not, snuff out their own light. Anger, despair, nihilism are the surest ways to darken our presence. We all know what it is like to be around someone who shines brightly. We want to be around them, to stand in their light and feel their warmth. A bright person makes us feel better about ourselves and our world, shows us how we too can be better, brighter people. Likewise, we all know what it is like to be around someone who is the opposite, someone who acts small and makes others feel small in turn. Who would you rather be?

Seneca once wrote that “anger is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall.” He meant that anger is both self-defeating and self-fulfilling. If we treat anger as an end unto itself we inevitably collapse into our feelings rather than address the causes of our anger. Once there, we feel powerless to change our circumstances. Thus we become angrier still, and the cycle continues. 

I would add to Seneca’s quote the malaise that has taken hold of our culture. Chronic despondency is a paralytic which stiffens our ethical muscles and numbs our moral nerves. It finds reasons to justify nihilism, the belief that there is no value in anything, no higher purpose worth pursuing, no difference between self-interest and selflessness. It blinds us to the real examples of progress in our lives and in the world. And most worryingly, it confirms our own belief in the ghastliness of the world, for there will always be problems to worry about and sufferings to bear. 

The attitudes that have coarsened our ability to empathize with others paradoxically arise from an excess of feeling. A person who feels deeply can become overwhelmed by humanity’s capacity for greed, cruelty, and bigotry. Young people are especially vulnerable to this. Confronted with our collective sins, some people retreat into themselves as a defense mechanism. They close themselves off and stop being gracious and open with others. This is when nihilism seeps in. 

These negative feelings want a target. We crave meaning. Terrible events and situations cannot exist on their own—there must be a reason for it all, something or someone responsible. This is how we begin to sort the human race into “good” and “bad” people, “oppressors” and “oppressed,” those deserving of our empathy and those who are not. Once we start down this path, it becomes easier for us to embrace political and ideological extremes. We begin to see every social issue not as a problem to be solved but as a symptom of humanity’s moral rot, a confirmation of what we knew all along—that everyone is equally corrupt. 

We become like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Underground Man, Camus’ Meursault, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. Devoid of purpose and meaning, we float aimlessly in what Viktor Frankl called the existential vacuum. We become easy prey for bad ideas like nativism, populism, identity politics, because these ideas at least give us some feeling of control over the world. Our culture encourages us to retreat into ourselves, to harden our souls against the world, to shut out sincerity. 

Sam Harris has described a moral landscape where there are peaks and valleys of well-being. Just as there are many ways to live well—many peaks—there are equally many ways to live poorly—in the valleys of the moral landscape. I believe that American culture has fallen into such a valley. The way out is not through more anger, despair, and nihilism, but through gratitude, forgiveness, and optimism 

Forgiveness is often misconstrued as apologizing for humanity’s sins. But is that really such a bad thing? Do we not deserve a dose of sympathy every now and then? In the grand scheme of life on Earth, we humans are still in our evolutionary infancy. We have stumbled, we have crawled, we have broken things and bruised ourselves. And slowly, through trial and error, we have learned to walk. In my view, we desperately need to be reminded every once in a while that our mistakes do not condemn us forever. 

“Forgive them, Father,” goes the famous line, “for they know not what they do.” There is a reason why this utterance has survived the centuries. Like salve on a wound, it touches a profound need within us for mercy and understanding. We are broken beings. We ought to treat ourselves more gently.

This does not mean we should ignore injustice or turn a blind eye to evil. On the contrary, being open and forgiving sharpens our moral senses. Think of someone like Daryl Davis, who transformed the pain of racism into a commitment to changing minds. Through empathy and understanding, Davis, who is black, has convinced dozens of white Klansmen to renounce their racial hatred and leave the KKK. Few of us can aspire to that level of moral courage, but we can learn from people like Davis. When we commit to loving humanity, foibles and all, we shine a bright light into the darkness. We illuminate a path, however vague, for others to follow.

Just as we must forgive us our trespasses, so too must we be grateful for our accomplishments. This is hard to do. From a young age our media ecosystem trains us to fixate on tragedy, violence, and disorder. “If it bleeds it leads.” The solution, then, is to actively seek out and notice just a few of the infinite number of things that go right during the day. This is called reframing, a common technique in cognitive behavioral therapy. And the best part? It works! Gratefulness is like a muscle that needs to be exercised. It feels like work at first, but given enough time it becomes second nature to pay closer attention to the things we otherwise take for granted. 

Gratefulness and forgiveness can make us more optimistic people. They remind us that we are capable of remarkable things, both on an individual and collective level. Archimedes once declared that he needed only a lever and a place to stand and he could move the world. This is the attitude we need more than ever in our culture. War and climate change and inequality are frightening problems. We will never solve them if we have already decided that there is nothing else to be done, that they are beyond our capacity.

I mentioned Helen Keller earlier. If there was ever a person who had reason to feel hopeless and resentful, it was her. But through suffering Keller learned to appreciate life, to be forgiving of humanity, and to be optimistic about our future. “Although the world is full of suffering,” she wrote, “it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail.” 

Wouldn’t you like to have stood in her light?

I believe with all my heart that in every person there is, yes, the will to power and domination. But also the will to meaning, the will to goodness, the will to belonging and acceptance. We will always wrestle with our darker inclinations. This is an inescapable reality. But we can choose at each moment how we will approach life. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously observed, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every man.” On which side of this line do you suppose nihilism sits?

We all recognize those people who have mastered the art of living well, those supremely bright souls who light the way for the rest of us. Martin Luther King, Jr. was such a person. Malala Yousafzai is another. “[I]n the light,” Yousafzai observed, “we find our courage again.” We should aspire to their level of moral greatness and recognize that we will often fall short, and forgive ourselves when we do. Most importantly, we should be kind. Through every small act of kindness, in every hopeful thought, we make our little corner of the world that much better.

Emerson observed that a person’s “opinion of the world is also a confession of his character.” The pervasive nihilism in our culture has made us into mean, despairing people. Too many of us have given up on sincerity. Optimism has become a foolish endeavor at best, a betrayal of the cause du jour at worst. We should strive for a life well-lived. We should not be afraid to shine a little brighter.