I have no doubt that we can create a really miraculous future. I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.
So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
Pessimism that leads to a self fulfilling prophecy is irrational, but you still need a win. A win is fuel.
I agree with this, and I recognize it as the good intentions behind faith communities.
People are (statistically) terrible at creating optimism on a blank canvas. They need narratives and common points of understanding.
And then the other side of human nature gets to take its swing at the mass of optimistic people with a shared belief system. :)
That is an argument of the pessimists and enemies of the good.
Pessimism is clearly irrational: Look at the world we live in; look what humanity has achieved since the Enlightenment, and in the last century - freedom, peace, and prosperity have swept the world. Diseases are wiped out, we visit the moon and (robotically) other planets, the Internet, etc. etc. etc.
To be pessimistic about our ability to build a better world is bizarre.
Choosing a belief that is less desirable than the most likely, is equally irrational, clearly pessimistic, and often self-fulfilling.
So the ideal belief system is irrational (optimistic) but only to a chosen and realistic extent.
Somewhere between Pollyanna and Eeyore, but more P than E. And as irrational psychologies go, moderate-P is by far the more successful of the two.
Maybe I need to to separate the art from the artist?
"South Korea is second from bottom on our list in terms of the proportion of people saying their country “is heading in the right direction”, with only 15% stating so. A similar sentiment is also felt about the economy. Pessimism is usually the standard for South Korea; however, their economic indicator score has been particularly low in recent times, with just 8% believing the economy is “good”."
https://www.ipsos.com/en-ch/what-worries-world-may-2025?utm_...
Yes. We die but the consequences of our actions resonate indefinitely. Ideas make good idols and people do not. Better Родина-мать зовёт! (a statue in Stalingrad approximately "Motherland [ie Russia] calls") and Liberty, which are both definitely statues about ideas than the Lincoln Memorial for example, or even arguably the "Statue of Unity" which is named for Unity but in practice is explicitly a statue of a specific man - Sardar Patel.
As an example, consider the Guinea Worm Eradication Program. In theory, sheer bloodymindedness and mass effort could have yielded the majority of the initial effects for great suppression. But the application of modern technology (and I include incentive system design in this category) brings the cost down sufficiently for successful eradication.
Suppression of the disease is possible with old techniques: case maps, word of mouth reporting, logbooks. Now detection to containment is far faster because of digital technology. You can't just dump temephos on everything. You need to target application.
The transmission of data specifically is a problem that most people discount the difficulty of. As an example that more people will be able to relate to, there was a delay in the October 2025 jobs report and it was finally released without an unemployment rate. Many people didn't get why it was hard.
One viral tweet (mirrored by others) went:
> Can't we just...
> (rubs temples)
> Can't we just divide the number of unemployed workers by the work force population? Isn't that the unemployment rate?
But you don't know what those two numbers are. You need machinery to get it. The machinery has a lot of middle management. It cannot function without.
Society today is a complex thing. To get insight into it you need a lot of infrastructure. The fact that we all have electric power, that roads across the country are reliable, that bridges are all up, that planes fly and trains run, is a marvel. It's a marvel enabled by all the bits that people work on, all the boring bits: yes, even procurement software. And yes, corporate law and bureaucracy. All of these things make this possible.
I think a very common thing in online forums is to look at a flowering tree and say "Oh, look at the flowers. They are so beautiful. Instead of such ugly bark and wood why don't we make more flowers?". Building the society that has the muscle to do this is part of making things like this happen.
> Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
It is still possible to do good when things are bleak and there is no possible way out - just because doing good is the right thing[1]. Optimism helps a lot for morale, but is not a precondition.
1. e.g. the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine.
I really don't think people understand how little difference there is between having $1 billion and $10 billion or even $100 billion. It makes no difference whatsoever to have that much money; they can't enjoy it.
Optimism doesn't necessarily mean hope. It can mean belief in an afterlife. An end to a suffering. Or gratitude for having someone else in a terrible moment.
I think OP is correct. You can't have good without optimism. Your point, which is also correct, is you can do good without hope.
It's not just a lack of desire (apathy). People who want to solve big, collective problems are increasingly up against groups who actively want to not solve the problems and/or make the problems worse. COVID, for example, was so much worse than it had to be, purely from people actively fighting efforts meant to contain it. Efforts to reverse or mitigate Climate Change are routinely and vigorously opposed.
op·ti·mism (noun): hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something.
The problem is, that way of thinking is just like the "co2 footprint" - individualise responsibility from where it belongs (=the government) to individual people, and let's be real, outside of the very last action item many people don't have the time and/or the money.
At some point, we (as in: virtually all Western nations) have to acknowledge that our governments are utter dogshit and demand better. Optimism requires trust in that what you work for doesn't get senselessly destroyed the next election cycle.
I suspect answers couched in terms of individualism will always sound inadequate to questions that are inherently collectivist, such as why people do things "for the greater good" detrimental to their own well-being.
We're not talking about hypotheticals - we can always construct hypotheticals that yield the answer we desire - but the real world.
Extrrnalising that to "the government" is to pretend you had no say, or to collectively try and pretend everyone else is with you & which they observably are not.
Edit: and before anyone responds with to me with a quip about money and corporations - money in politics buys advertising and campaigning. It doesn't buy votes directly, and when it does that's corruption and what's done about that is still largely on you the voter to set your priorities at the ballot box.
What revelations? That the guy at the helm of the Gates Foundation uses escorts?
Next thing you're gonna lose faith in Lady Gaga because she doesn't write her own songs...
It's trivial to not have this problem, the fact that a relatively large fraction of the world's population needed intervention to fix this is an indictment on our collective will.
You may have read, or at least heard about John Green's book "Everything is Tuberculosis". Treating TB is, by comparison to Guinea Worm, really hard. When medics tell John that - all being equal - nobody should die of TB because we could just fix it, they mean with like a hospital full of doctors to diagnose and prescribe treatment, pharmaceutical companies to make the drugs, stuff that looks like technology to you.
To eradicate Guinea Worm Disease you need basic clean water. I'm not talking "Wait, does this tap water meet current national standards for UV treatment?" clean water, I'm talking like, "don't drink directly out of the village pond" clean water. That's really what it takes for this to just go away on its own. The interventions are because crazily in 2026 large numbers of humans do not have ready access to clean drinking water.
His relationship with Epstein and the alleged secret dosing of his wife with antibiotics to clear an STD he gave Melinda from the escorts.
I hadn’t seen Bill’s denial of the STD claim when I made my comment and what went on there is murky according to the below. Bill denies and Melinda expresses sadness. What actually happened?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/04/business/melinda-bill-gat...