Optimism isn’t about seeing water levels; it’s about seeing possibilities. Joseph Greve
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.
Helen Keller
Mad respect to Helen Keller and her starchy endorsement of optimism, but I don’t subscribe to the notion that pessimists have never swashbuckled or furthered the species. I don’t have any hard science on this, but pessimists are everywhere. And we can’t just write them off. They teach university courses. They cut our hair. They friend us on Facebook. They marry and breed.
And they outnumber us. Us optimists.
“I am an optimist” is not the small talk nugget I am keen to deploy at a networking mixer hoping to impress strangers. Optimists are pegged as naïve, as 24/7 happy-mongers. We are dismissed as lacking the intellectual heft to see the world as it truly is: hopeless, dark, destined for failure. Pessimism skews as fashionable, cool, the POV of the counterculture. Ever stylish, it drapes itself in cynicism. But, pessimism is standstill. Optimism is locomotion.
Ample research says that we are all hardwired for optimism; it’s baked into our mainframes. Countervailing research says optimism is learned. In her quote above, Helen Keller calls optimism a form of faith, implying it as a choice, a decision. Others see it as a force.
Christopher Peterson calls optimism a constructive power. Peterson is a former psychology professor at the University of Michigan and one of the founders of positive psychology. He published a crystal ball-gazing paper 22 years ago about optimism and its relationship with wellbeing. In his research findings, he calls optimism “a Velcro construct to which everything sticks.”
Rather than a form of attitudinal flypaper, I think of my optimism as a lens through which experiences are viewed as invitations rather than laments. “Optimism is seeing problems as challenges that are solvable,” says Hannah Ritchie, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford. She echoes the sentiment of Winston Churchill: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Ritchie’s focus is on the intersection of human development and environmental sustainability. She views optimism as vital for large-scale problem solving. We need it to make progress, she argues. Instead of cataloguing problems in a reflexive loop, optimists imagine the uncharted terrain of other ways of being, of solutions the imagination may be as yet unable to conjure.
Infused with hope and confidence, optimism is my propulsive belief in possibility. I learned it from my mother. But I don’t wear the team T-shirt or go to club meetings. At times it feels as if I am part of a closeted subculture, but the only person keeping that door shut is me. Why am I embarrassed by my optimism? Hesitant to declare it loud and proud? It could be the superficial misconceptions. Maybe it is because I shy away from the trope as an American living in Bulgaria, a country beset by a pessimism that curdles into defeatism. Or perhaps it is the semantic baggage of the word itself.
When I feel self-conscious about my optimism or fatigued maintaining it under the barrage of doom spewing, I think about my large-hearted friend Julie who calls herself a possibilitarian. I think about radical hope beaming itself into a future that invents itself in a dearth of despair.
After all those thoughts, my mind circles back to being in the presence of 19 university students who meet every Monday and Thursday afternoons to discuss global social issues. Climate change, statelessness, human rights violations, marginalized groups: it’s a heavy menu. They sit around a large conference table, playing respectful tennis with their perspectives. They tack between points of view. They redraw their maps of the world with their passions and indignations. They redraw their maps of themselves. I see them straddle the present and the future as they navigate this fraught, resplendent world. And I am honored to take my place among them.
