There is a strange prestige attached to pessimism. Tell someone that civilization is collapsing and you sound serious. Tell them that the future is probably going to be amazing and you sound a little naive.
We have this exactly backward.
Spend enough time online and you can assemble a pretty convincing case that everything is terrible. Politics is broken. Technology is destroying us. The economy is rigged. The culture is decaying. AI will take everyone’s jobs. Nobody can afford a house. Nobody is having children. The climate is changing. Institutions are failing. Somewhere, at this very moment, a guy with a podcast microphone is explaining why Rome fell.
Those problems are real, and deserve serious attention. But there is a difference between noticing problems and adopting doom as a disposition.
The latter is a terrible way to live.
The world is also astonishingly full of possibility. Most of us carry a device in our pocket that gives us access to nearly the entire accumulated knowledge of mankind. You can learn almost anything for essentially nothing. You can start a company from your kitchen table. You can make something in Florida and sell it to someone in Finland. You can publish an essay without asking an editor, make a film without a studio, write software without a computer science degree, or have a machine teach you calculus at two in the morning.
A reasonably ordinary person has powers that emperors would have found difficult to comprehend.
And the interesting thing about abundance is that it compounds. Someone invents a tool. Someone else uses that tool to make another tool. A third person combines both with an idea borrowed from somewhere else. The frontier moves outward, usually in ways nobody planned.
This doesn’t guarantee a good future. Nothing does. Human beings remain perfectly capable of making a mess of things. But that’s precisely why optimism isn’t the belief that everything will work out. It’s the belief that there are things worth doing.
So build something.
Take the trip. Start the business. Write the book. Have the kid. Plant the tree. Learn to weld. Ask the girl out. Invite people over for dinner. Apply for the job you’re not quite qualified for. Make the ridiculous prototype. Say hello to the stranger standing next to you.
Walk around like God sent you.
I mean that literally. There is a remarkable difference between moving through the world as though you are an accidental consumer of it and moving through it as though you have been given something to do here. The second posture changes the way you see people. They stop looking like obstacles, competitors, demographic categories, or anonymous extras in your personal movie. You start noticing them.
Smile at people. Be generous. Expect good things from them. Give more than the situation requires. Most of this costs almost nothing, and it makes ordinary life considerably more pleasant.
There will always be reasons to be afraid. Fear is quite good at finding evidence for itself.
But so is hope.
Look around. There are eight billion people thinking, tinkering, loving, building, fixing, arguing, inventing, raising children, making dinner, and trying again tomorrow. The story is nowhere close to finished.
Life is electric.
Act accordingly.
