< On choosing optimism?

It can be easy to consider optimism the naive or simply ignorant choice. Pessimism, by contrast, feels like the clear-eyed, realistic view.

I don't think that's true. At least not for me.

For many (most?) of us, pessimism is our default thinking. And increasingly I find myself spiralling towards things I find negative[1]. For me, optimism is harder. Less comfortable. It demands vulnerability and genuinely opens us up to being wrong[2][3].

I'm not talking about being naive or uncritical. It's not sitting back and hoping things work out. As Rebecca Solnit put it, hope "is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency"[4]. It's choosing to work toward something better despite knowing it might fail. It's about saying "how can I make this better?".

Take a concrete example. AI is currently blowing up Software Engineering. Many engineers are rightly concerned their careers (as they know them) will no longer exist[5]. For many this is a genuine source of grief, which I share.

On the other hand, I've seen people building software who have never had access before. More people are getting to enjoy a form of building that I've enjoyed most of my life. This is transformative, and pretty damn fun.

There are real challenges. Choosing optimism doesn't mean I ignore those; it's about where I put my energy to have the most positive impact.

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Footnotes

  1. This feels easier to do lately. Turns out it is. Widely cited paper Bad Is Stronger Than Good shows that negative events have a greater psychological impact than positive ones across nearly every domain. ↩

  2. Brene Brown's Daring Greatly makes the case that vulnerability isn't weakness — it's courage. Choosing optimism is exactly this kind of exposure. ↩

  3. At Culture Amp one of our founding values is have the courage to be vulnerable. The phrasing around courage and vulnerability was very deliberate. ↩

  4. Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark (2004 and 2016). ↩

  5. This is just one facet. There are genuine environmental, social, and political impacts that are hard to ignore. ↩