[deleted]
I Choose Optimism
11–20 of 222 posts
Re: I Choose Optimism
#12You choose homeostasis. Feeeling good about the future makes you feel good. This leads to immediate improvements in one's quality of life. People are attracted to those who have a "positive outlook." No one likes hanging around a doomsayer.
This author clearly lives in a place where he can afford such optimism. It's not so easy in the slums of Tanzania.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things did get better globally, even if marginally for most, but at what price. If I take out a loan to live it up for a year, but then have no way of paying it back, because I haven't invested the money into anything substantial did things really got better for me? With the Industrial Revolution, and later the Green Revolution we began accumulating a debt. All the gains we made were borrowed against the future. This…
"If I take out a loan to live it up for a year, but then have no way of paying it back, because I haven't invested the money into anything substantial did things really got better for me?" Yes. Because those you spent it with must have, or you wouldn't have been able to buy anything with it. Therefore you caused things to happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened. Debt is one of human's greatest inventions. It's w…
Ecological and resource extractive debt is not magic, they have limits and externalities that most financial systems don't fully account for in their balance sheets.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#14Humans no longer seeing themselves as the pawns of nature is nothing to be proud of. We still depend on nature, nothing have changed, only this dependence is now obfuscated. There is a buffer between us and nature, which makes us utterly blind to the consequences of our actions. We are not living in the best of times, we are living the biggest lie ever. Our way of life is utterly unsustainable, and by our way of life…
Society decided we wanted good things and we took action to get those things. I am against poverty and not having things such as electricity and clean tap water, abundant food, education, hospital care, sewage treatment and proper waste disposal. I like these things, they are good. You would be surprised at how sustainable things are by sheer hard work and will. In other words, we get what we cause. The alternative t…
That’s a false dichotomy; we can have all these things without burning down rainforests at a furious pace and filling the oceans with plastic, etc. These things are done out of laziness and carelessness.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#15It’s great to recognise what we’ve achieved as a species. And maybe the arc of history has historically bent towards justice.
What’s different about this moment in time versus any other in human history is that we face not one but two known existential risks.
Climate change is the sort of knotty long-term vs short-term, private vs public, incentives problem that we as a species excel at fucking up.
In addition to that, we have a new cold war and the proliferation of nuclear weapons to states that haven’t previously had them and have different ideas about using them. If you’ve read any accounts of nuclear near-misses from the last Cold War, you’ll know that “there was never any real danger” is the wrong conclusion to draw.
Respectfully, I don’t understand the case for optimism at all. The fact that the vast majority of people are good (and I believe that they are) has little bearing on it.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#16American homes in 1950 averaged 983 square feet; by 2014, the size had nearly tripled to 2,657 square feet. Today, 91 percent of our homes are air-conditioned. This is not actually a good thing. This is actually a problem.
Exactly. The author is living in a middle/upper class suburbian bubble. Bigger and bigger houses that consume more and more resources is a problem, not a sign of progress. It is a glaring sign of the consumerism and resource depletion that is fueling the crisis we're in.
There is no amount of renewable energy that will make "average homes are 2,657 square feet and have air conditioning" a sustainable way of living.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#17Who is going to rebut optimism? But only the part that needs a fair counterweight to it. Consider the evidence that life of all kinds thrives everywhere. It is its very purpose to thrive above all else, or it just ceases. Existence then, necessarily favours a force or direction for life to thrive, even just probabilistically. I would argue that these favourable odds for life to exist and thrive are indistinguishable from an intent for life, for you, to thrive. And this is the rational case for a divine intent. For you, as life, to thrive. Accepting this as an axiom of your existence is all anyone needs to experience the optimism described so well in the article. It's the funniest thing in the world to look back and be wrong about as well.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#18This article comes across as extremely tone-deaf, and the author seems unaware of the existential scale of the problems humanity is facing. The fact that the phrase "climate change" only appears once - at the beginning, as a throwaway line - really speaks volumes.
If the only problems we face were war and rising Christian fascism, I would also be optimistic, because those things can and have been fought successfully in the past. However...
The very real situation of climate change, described by leading scientists as "code red for humanity," cannot be waved away by comparing our current struggles to that of medieval peasants seeking freedom from monarchy. We're talking about a collapsing biosphere. We're talking about mass extinction. We're talking about large areas of the Earth becoming functionally uninhabitable.
I would even be optimistic about that, too, if world leaders (economic and political) seemed to take any of it seriously. But they don't, so I'm not. And I think the author is conveniently ignoring this entire subject.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#19The media is highly pessimistic. So yeah when you look at the world you are looking at the world through a biased lens of pessimism. Pessimsim draws attention and sells hence the media creates a sort of negative viewpoint of the world.
But here's the weird part. Most individuals bias towards optimism. Most people are unable to see the hard truths of the world or even about themselves. The world is indeed cruel and hard and on the individual level people can't admit certain things about themselves. We see the world through rose colored lenses.
When people look at the world or news, they think everything is going to shit. But on the individual level when they look at things locally or at themselves, things are actually a bit too positive. People lie to themselves.
It's a strange dichotomy.
You will note that no one on this thread talks about what goes in between pessimism and optimism. What is the middle ground? That's how deluded everyone is. They read her article and buy into her BS. To be pessimist is to be negatively biased. To be optimist is to be positively biased. Logically the middle ground will then be unbiased.
Truth is what lies in between positive and negative biases. I choose to be unbiased. I choose to not be pessimistic or optimistic. I choose truth.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#20It's easy (and popular) to be a pessimist but when I look at objective global data on decade+ time scales, the only rational conclusion is that things are generally getting better for more people in more places than ever before (data like global poverty, infant mortality, literacy, etc). That doesn't mean we don't still have a ways to go and it certainly doesn't mean that things aren't terrible for some people in som…
The economy gets better for more people in more places than ever before. Environmental destruction is also progressing faster than ever before. Many crucial ecosystems are on the brink of collapse (e.g. the rainforests) and we show no signs of intending to protect them.