Sun, 17 Jul 2022
The Incompatibility of Optimism and Fatalism
I have a general distaste for optimism as a concept and, as a rule, I don't tend to see eye to eye with optimists. They often find me overly cynical while I find them overly naïve. There are exceptions to these generalizations, as we’ll see below but, typically, my view on optimism can be summed up by a single word: delusional. That’s not to say I’m a pessimist. I tend to sum up pessimism with a single word as well: toxic. No, I’m a realist.
The funny thing about being a realist is that, when I mentioned that I’m a realist to optimists, they will usually tell me something to the effect of, “Oh, that’s just code for saying you’re a pessimist,” which is a view I find deeply troubling and lacking in self-awareness. I’m a realist—meaning I try to view the world in terms of practicality—in other words, I attempt to step back and view things as they are, rather than as I’d like them to be or as it sometimes feels like they are.
Both good and bad things happen. To claim that one who tries to see the world in pragmatic terms is a pessimist might be the single most pessimistic statement I can imagine. Reality is not code for pessimism; it’s not code for anything, not how I use it, anyway. It’s quite literal for me, and it’s an attempt at objectivity.
I sometimes fall too much into the pessimistic camp and, I’m sure, become exhausting to be around. At other times, I fall too much into the optimistic camp and get blindsided by brutalizing disappointment because of problematic expectations or hopes. Thus, I make an effort to view the world—and the events of my life, more specifically—in terms of the realistic likelihood of outcomes and not through the distortions of either rose-colored glasses or half-empty cups. I don’t always succeed in this, but it is my genuine goal.
***
There’s a graffiti tag on the stairs leading up to the pedestrian walkway crossing the Fremont Bridge that says "You'll be fine! :)" and I find it grating. I find all similar such messages to be grating in the same kind of way. This is primarily because they imply inevitability. But “being fine" is not an inevitable outcome. In fact, it is counter to the process of all things.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that things will generally go from order to chaos unless energy from outside a given system is put into that system for the purpose of counteracting those tireless processes at work. Barring that energy—that agency—the only guaranteed outcome of the uninhibited flow of time is further breakdown, further decay, further entropy until, ultimately, the whole unsustainable system is consumed by disorder. (Note: The Second Law is talking about physical systems, so I’m certainly taking a few liberties here.)
The idea that "you'll be fine" or that "it’s gonna be okay" or, my favorite, that "it gets better" is as meaningless as the sentiment behind saying “thoughts and prayers” after either a large- or small-scale tragedy; unaccompanied by deliberate action, external or internal, it’s utter meaninglessness, complete nonsense.
On a broader scale, even such phrases as “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” instill in me similar misgivings, largely because that, too, implies inevitability. The opposite is inevitable unless otherwise acted upon.
That said, particularly in the lattermost case, I understand the sentiment. I understand why it’s nice. It allows for those nice, warm feelings, it allows for a sense of reassurance, that everything will work itself out for the better in the end. Whether or not this is actually the case, it helps to contextualize what is going on around us (and maybe inside us at the same time, as the case may be) and it makes us feel better, but it doesn't make anything actually better—it just makes us more prone to apathy and complacency. If we truly believe that things will just get better, why work towards fixing problems? If progress toward improvement is inevitable, there’s nothing we need to do.
So, yeah, I hate those sorts of messages. They appear to me to come from a place of massive insecurity and a reticence to address anything real, anything unpleasant, uncomfortable. In my view, this is—in and of itself—a position of privilege. "Things have basically worked out up to now; I’m sure they'll continue to do so forever." That’s a mindset I cannot get behind for at least two reasons: 1) it is, at best, a reductive refusal to take seriously a person’s (or persons’) predicament or, at worst, an intolerance for discomfort to such a severe degree that one would rather platitudinize a legitimate problem than expend the emotional energy to really empathize and troubleshoot, and 2) it demonstrates that someone is blind to their own privilege and are assuming that theirs is the normative, ubiquitous experience.
In the former case, speaking as a person struggling with depression, if you’re inclined to try a platitude like “it gets better,” there’s no shame in simply saying, “I’m sorry to hear you’re going through that.” I loathe platitudes and baseless aphorisms to an extent that is perhaps a little extreme, but I truly find them to be the most dismissive and self-absorbed sentiments to throw out there in almost any situation. Unless it’s coming from a place of shared experience and is part of a broader conversation with emotional gravity behind it (which is something I have rarely encountered when these trite phrases are bandied about, but it does happen now and again), I cannot get on board.
In the latter case, speaking as a person who has wrestled a great deal with guilt surrounding his relative privilege, if you’re inclined to assume that your experience is most likely going to be true of everyone, it’s difficult to understate how tone deaf such expressions can sound (with the same parenthetical caveat as in the paragraph above).
I do understand the impulse, though. I used to think along similar lines, and not through any fault of my own; it’s a question of exposure and education (whether formal or self-directed), not necessarily a question of inherent moral shortcoming…unless, of course, you’ve exposed yourself to differing experiences, educated yourself on those experiences, and decided to double down on the heterogeneity of your own limited anecdotal perspective to the obtuse exclusion of all others.
In my experience—and I’ve mentioned this before—I have been blind to my own privilege and had to do a lot of soul searching to broaden my horizons. As one example of this blindness, I used to believe that if I prayed, good things would happen. But in reality, “I now realize it wasn’t any god [that answered my prayers]; privilege answered my prayers.”
I'm a white, straight-presenting, cisgendered male person in the United States of America so of course things tend to work out for me. The system is quite literally on my side and I shouldn’t project that onto a different experience or demographic—particularly one against whom the systemic deck is stacked.
The idea that things are just going to continuously improve, that things always tend to progress towards better and better outcomes over time, is a line of thinking I find woefully problematic (if I’m being generous, I find it to be utterly lazy if I’m feeling less generous; my apologies to Steven Pinker). For any progress any of us have seen, whether collective social progress or individual personal progress, there was a lot of energy that went into such improvement.
Think about the Civil Rights era as one example. How many protests and injustice was suffered before any historic progress was made? And think of all the injustices people still suffer every day and how much work there is yet to do. Or think of anybody who's struggled with addiction now celebrating consecutive time sober. Whether they’re celebrating a few days or several years sober, in most cases it took a lot of effort to get to that point, and takes continual effort to remain there.
It didn't just happen. And the idea that it will is dangerous.
***
I find my sense of hope in chaos. Everything is going to happen, both good things and bad. Chaos is what is inevitable. But if I input intentional energy into a chaotic system, maybe I can influence or aid the resistance to entropy’s insatiable appetite. I can use my agency (or my perceived agency, rather) to affect those outcomes I am able, recognizing my realistic limitations. That things will simply get better is weirdly fatalistic wishful thinking.
The irony here is I could be described as a hard determinist. I don't think free will is a meaningful thing we human beings possess. I believe that whatever is going to happen is whatever was always going to happen. That's not to say we don't have that sense of free will, the sense that we are all active agents in our own destinies. And really, for all practical purposes, each of us lives as though our decisions are original to us, as though we could choose differently than we’ve ever chosen or ever will choose. To be clear, I also wouldn’t have it any other way. But I also don't think we could possibly make any decisions other than the decisions we are making right now, that we have always made, that we will continue to make. If you ask me, our timeline is rigid, fixed.
There is a comical irony to me here because the kinds of people who would lean into those sentiments of inevitable progress are often also the kinds of people who would bristle at my deterministic outlook on the cosmic nature of life, the universe, and everything. Beyond that, though, let’s take this irony even deeper and venture into the realm of downright paradox.
I find the idea of indefinitely sustained existence just fucking exhausting. The longer I live the more exhausting it gets. It's not getting better, if anything, it's getting worse. Not infrequently, I want to die. I am tired of living, tired of existing. And I recently recognized the need to put energy into my internal system to change that unsustainable trajectory. It’s not going to get better. It hasn't yet. I don't see any reason why it would, barring my own intervention.
If I leave things as is, if I just trust that “it gets better,” I will eventually kill myself. It's not going to happen tomorrow, it's probably not even going to happen within the next several months, but it's going to happen sooner or later unless I make some massive changes that are far from guaranteed.
With that as the baseline, here’s a paradox that I think is just fucking fascinating. Quite simply, I am one of the most optimistic people that I know. I do not want to live, and yet, I am doing everything I can to stay alive, to make it less likely that I will die. For some reason, I both want to die and am taking active steps to prevent that from happening because, on the deepest level, I do know that if given enough time everything that can happen will happen. The implication here is that bad things will happen, of course, but it also means good things will happen. The thing about things that happen, though, is I have to be alive if I wish to experience them.
I am trying to buy myself more time because I want to experience good things—even if I also have to experience bad things. And this belief, this trust, that everything is possible if I'm just here to experience it is the most optimistic attitude I can imagine in the face of near complete existential exhaustion.
I want to die; yet I don't. And this because I truly believe that good things can and will happen if I just allow myself the opportunity to live one more day, and one more day after that, and so on. I realize that if I give up the ghost now, I will, perhaps, be relieved in the sense that I won't exist, which means I won't be longing for the end. At the same time, though, it also means I will never experience anything good again either.
There's this part of me, more of me than not, that wants to see good things happen. The recognition that those good things are not inevitable is what keeps me going and keeps me trying. If I believed good things were inevitable it would stop me in my tracks, I'd get lazy, and in the best of cases, I would be dead before forty. I’ve waited for good things for a long time, and sometimes they happen spontaneously, but more often than not, those good things happen because I chose to do something, allowing for that eventuality.
Sure. I might be fine, but not if I don't try to be.