There are ways we can alter our perception of the world. We can take drugs, ranging from caffeine (C8H10N4O2), to THC (C21H30O2), to LSD (C20H25N3O).
Special molecules of thought can alter our perception, too. Complex thoughts can be assembled from simpler ones, like molecules. One such molecule is optimism. This assertion is not flippant: being optimistic is a choice, and generally an adaptive one. Optimism can enhance everything from resilience to physical health.
Optimism is a wonder drug, but like any opioid, can have unwanted side effects. That’s the fundamental question I’d like to explore: how can we tell when we’re suffering from too much optimism? If we know when we’re going overboard, maybe we can use optimism more safely.
Broadcasting optimism
Optimism is an installable disposition. As surely as we can install software onto our phones, we can download well structured and well supported models of the world into our minds, and they can enhance our mind’s capacity to deal with the world around us. As surely as the widespread deployment of a public health app can help us to manage the outbreak of a disease, so can the widespread deployment of a behaviour.
We can install a disposition into a population that’s open to it. Once it’s installed - and once it’s been understood and practised a bit - we can trigger it with surprisingly succinct incantations. She’ll be right was a historically popular trigger in Australia. And again, this is not to be flippant. On the contrary, it’s a trigger for a widespread latent attitude in the population, and calls out to a well-honed process for dealing with setbacks or suboptimal outcomes, that has been rehearsed over a lifetime. A trite phrase, belying hidden complexity.
It’s an occasional theme in music as well:
There is a light and it never goes out (The Smiths)
Don’t Worry Be Happy (Bobby McFerrin)
Everything’s gonna be alright (Bob Marley)
Let’s riff on Bob Marley for a moment, to underscore the point that music is an important medium for transmitting sentiment.
Marley was heir to a musical tradition steeped in political significance. Ska was the soundtrack for Jamaica’s independence from Britain in 1962, and accompanied an optimistic decade of economic growth. Alongside ska’s evolution to rocksteady, the volume of the Jamaican economy turned down, and times were tougher in the 1970s. For those who stayed in Jamaica, rocksteady continued its evolution into reggae, infused with social commentary that would make Marley something of a reluctant political figure. A voice for people in challenging times. A unifying force, and in particular, a unification of mood. It was the deployment of a certain disposition.
Many others walked out instead, looking for better times, and migrated to Thatcher’s Britain. The ska tradition found appeal there too amongst a working class generation who increasingly felt themselves separated from their aspirations by a thin black line of riot police. It transmuted into the punk scene. With no fear of dirt and decay, punk is shot through with energy and the possibility of getting shit created outside the prison of other people’s fucking judgement. Utopia right there in every subterranean dive, for anyone who cares to get it. What’s more optimistic than that?
And now we’ve wound our way back around to the spookily romantic kitchen sink realism of The Smiths where we began. So we can get back to discovering how to use optimism safely.
Understanding optimism
Optimism is frequently adaptive, but not always. To understand this, let’s throw optimism up on the two-post hoist and examine it from a slightly different angle. We frequently think of optimism as a positive evaluation of the future: if we feel good about what we see coming, we’re optimists. But optimism is actually an evaluation of the present. It’s the belief that by simply keeping on, the future is going to turn out in the best possible way. From where we stand, doing what we’re doing, the exciting mirage is within reach. It’s the evaluation that our present stance is optimal.
A particular branded form of optimism, called Leibniz optimism, illustrates this well. Leibniz optimism is a baroque answer to the question: why would a perfect deity create the imperfect world we see? As a layperson, and not a trained logician, it strikes me as a classic case of begging the question, but maybe I’m being lazy and unfair. The argument is that there is a perfect deity, and the deity created this world, therefore this apparently imperfect world is the best possible world that could exist. This is not a characterisation of some future world, but of the present one. It’s an assertion that we can be optimistic, because our world is optimal as it is now.
It’s easy to make fun of Leibniz’ optimism, most fully articulated in 1710, but of course it served him well. Leibniz made many important contributions to science, including the invention of infinitesimal calculus - simultaneously with Newton - underwritten by his sunny intellectual disposition.
These days, the progeny of the “best of all possible worlds” idea is found in the pentecostal prosperity doctrine. It’s the doctrine that underwrote the Australian prime minister’s inaction in the face of bushfire season. It’s a belief that whatever luck befalls us is not only deserved, but ordained. So we need not combat injustice or reduce risk, because if it were necessary, a deity would already have done so for us. Let the world burn, QED.
Handle with care
Therein lies the danger in excessive optimism. It implies that there’s nothing more to be done, because the future is as rosy as we can possibly make it. As optimists, we’re not paralysed by indecision. We’re paralysed by the decision that this is as good as it’s going to get.
Branded optimism is rife in my line of work too. Computer programming. For programmers, it’s techno-optimism. A discouraging supermajority of programmers wholeheartedly believe that every problem has a technical solution. Not only a solution, but an imminent solution, that is rushing towards us propelled by nothing more than Moore’s law. Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years. The direct implication is that computers are getting faster and cheaper all the time. The second order implication is that soon computers will be so fast and so cheap that no problem on earth can continue to exist in the face of overwhelming computational power.
This article of faith is also transferred to many other fields by programmers: as a collective, we believe that we’ll soon have almost free solar power, and almost free lab-grown meat, and almost free travel between Sydney and London. The concept of Moore’s law rules our world to such an extent that we can’t perceive its boundaries.
The clear implication is that we’re all good. Everything is all good. No worries. It’s a comforting mythology in a field that can be numbingly beige - this mythology that we’re playing a role in this revolution of human possibility, instead of just orchestrating an endless list of coloured boxes on people’s laptop screens. It’s an obdurate mythology, too, because it’s generally true. The reach of technology is constantly accelerating, both outward and inward. And the phenomenon of acceleration is not constrained to silicon - it exists also in biomolecules, and batteries, and 3D printing. But the problem with a mythology that’s almost always true is that it’s tempting to transfer it to problems where it isn’t true.
Dr Seuss wrote eloquently about our belief that all the solutions are out there, hurtling towards us, and we just have to await their arrival:
Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come,
or a plane to go or the mail to come,
or the rain to go or the phone to ring,
or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.
(from Oh, The Places You’ll Go).
Today, we’re waiting for a vaccine
Or a trip to Mars
Or electric cars
Or a pipe with water to break the drought
And we’re just waiting.
We’re all waiting for some imaginary technical genius to construct solutions to all our problems. We’ve believed since childhood that nothing is out of reach of our ingenuity, and so we’re waiting for it to happen.
We have said to ourselves: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, but we mustn’t forget: grant me the courage to change the things I can. Where we have an opportunity to select a better future, static optimism is not the best tool for the job.
The third panel of the triptych asks for the wisdom to know the difference. Let’s zoom in on this third panel.
Sound judgement
We need the wisdom to know the difference, and wisdom is not easy to come by. How do we tell the difference between an optimal and non-optimal position?
An optimal position is one that’s on the top of the hill. There’s no further to go in any direction. That’s what optimal means. Now, moving uphill requires work, and work is uncomfortable. And we’re really good at sensing potential discomfort, because we love to avoid it. I’d argue that even when we can’t sense directly which way to go, we remain hypersensitive to the direction that will be most uncomfortable. The impending discomfort can be a useful proxy for something we can’t see. We can’t see the hill with our eyes, but we can feel it with our gut.
Become sensitive to the gradient of discomfort. That can lead us in the right direction.
I like this approach, because it gives recourse to something simple and clear: our senses. We don’t need heavyweight analysis. We can let our gut tell us whether we’re really doing the best possible, and we can do so through the powerful emotion of fear. Do we fear having to do more? Then we should do more. Perhaps, if we look around and can’t see any direction that would make make our legs burn with lactic acid from the uphill slog, we really are in an optimal position.
During 2020, for example, is the best we can do to sit around and wait for the lab-coated deities to bring us a vaccine? Or can we do more right now to construct a liveable world, alongside a virus that may share our planet for some time? Can we start to restructure habits and relationships in a way that acknowledges this new truth? Can we find, in this new landscape, the tops of new, different hills, and climb towards them?
Dr Seuss canvassed this, too, in Oh, The Places You’ll Go. He exhorts us, should we find ourselves in The Waiting Place:
NO!
That’s not for you!
Somehow you’ll escape
all that waiting and staying.
You’ll find the bright places
where Boom Bands are playing.
Knowing that you’re currently doing the best possible thing brings great serenity. So we should change our behaviour until we can be confident that we’re doing the best possible thing, at which time we have achieved true cause for optimism.