Following last week’s intro on solution-focused journalism, I had a delightfully philosophical email exchange with a DD reader about whether our default view of the world should be a more optimistic one. It was funny because we both played the roles stereotypical of our respective countries: he, being a US American, represented the glass-half-full optimist and I, being German, the glass-half-empty pessimist.

While I do believe that there is a place and time for both, I think that pessimism’s bad reputation is undeserved. The right type of pessimism can offer us a gentler, kinder approach to overcoming problems. Pessimism also offers greater potential for the kind of critical analysis that leads to meaningful change.

I often come back to this speech by Alain de Botton in which he – contrary to the pervasive can-do spirit of our times – proposes that we ought to start anything with the assumption that things won’t turn out well. Citing various sources, he argues that feelings of failure and disappointment are some of the most destructive yet least acknowledged forces in ourselves and society more generally.

At one point, de Botton refers to the concurrent rise of two types of self-help genres as proof of the damaging effects of optimism: one telling us that everybody can succeed if we just try hard enough and the other one helping us cope with low self-esteem.

“I think there is a real relationship [between the two]: a society that tells people that they can achieve anything will also be a society that very swiftly develops a problem with self-esteem. If everybody expects to achieve everything, you’re going to get an awful lot of people who are feeling that something’s gone dramatically wrong with their lives.”

Dipping into the work of stoic philosopher Seneca, who saw optimism as a great source of anger, de Botton lightheartedly points out that the British don’t get angry when it rains because it matches expectations. Being stuck in traffic, however, evokes feelings of rage. Cars are sold to us with notions of freedom and convenience, not traffic jams. “It’s our expectations that define what will anger us.”

de Botton later quotes Nietzsche, which is quite bleak on its own but offers a fitting transition to my next point:

“If you refuse to let your suffering lie upon you for even an hour; if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful and worthy of annihilation and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that you harbour in your heart the religion of comfortableness.”

This reminds me of the essay Against Performative Positivity (see DD126) in which the design critic Danah Abdulla eloquently argues that optimism can also be seen as a form of conservatism, because it lacks deeply critical examination of the power and social structures underlying the status quo. In her view, too many designers come to a problem from a position of conformity, whereas truly transformative ideas require political dissent and activism, which emerge from a place of negativity, of seeing the faults and shortcomings first.

The closing remarks in Alain de Botton’s speech are, I think, quite wonderful and so I’ll borrow them to also send you on your merry miserable way:

“Pessimism is a feature of life. It’s a feature of life we often try to run away from. By running away from it too quickly, we cut ourselves off from the opportunity to embrace this darkness and to embrace the lessons that it often brings. And we often also cut ourselves off from the deepest kind of relationships which we can have with other human beings, relationships based around a confession of suffering. And I think that essentially all good friendships are about confessions, one sort or another. Confessions of things that the rest of the world thinks of as unacceptable, but are in fact part of human life.”

– Kai

Comment on this issue →