Co-opting Optimism

Last week, at our semesterly professional depression day, I maade the mistake of going to a workshop that was all about positive thinking or something. There were paper crowns and noisemakers and it was supposed to make us all excited to start the new semester. I went to the workshop to support a friend (whom I adore); I should perhaps have considered that friendship demands limits.

Part of the workshop was a pep-talk video from a National Geographic photographer whose key message was to "celebrate what's right with the world." He made a few insightful points and showed a variety of beautiful photographs. But as gorgeous pictures of nature continued to flash on the screen I couldn't help thinking, "what about deforestation, what about the giant heaps of garbage in the ocean, what about the melting glaciers?" I wanted to bring up these issues, but I knew that I would immediately be labeled as a cynic or as a student called me last semester, "a hater."

The truth is, I'm not a cynic. I think you should celebrate what's right with the world, but you shouldn't ignore what's wrong with the world. I am enthusiastic about teaching, but I'm also concerned about the pressure to work more for raises that we already deserve. I want to talk about what's right and wrong with the world.

I was stewing after that workshop, but in the end I'm glad I went because it made me realize a few things. Primarily, optimism has been entirely co-opted and redefined as a naive, feel-good approach to life. Optimism has been reduced to the wacko realm of The Secret where you only have to believe to achieve. All of this optimist rhetoric makes me feel like a cynic because I sure as hell don't believe that the universe is just waiting for me to tell it what I want I need.

But I'm not a cynic. I'm truly not. I'm not a feel-good optimist either and sometimes it feels like there isn't an option between the two.

The same night, I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth. Towards the end, Gore mentioned how the trouble with responding to global warming is that people often go from denial to despair without pausing to consider the space between--the space where one might actually do something. There is a lot right with the world, but there is a lot wrong--you don't have to select one view over the other. You can look at what's right as motivation to change what is wrong.

Perhaps this all seems simple, but it was quite a revelation to me. I used to be a fairly naive optimist. My mom once told me that I was only an optimist because I was young and nothing bad had ever happened to me. Yikes. I certainly chafed at that prouncement, which to me just confirmed my mom's role as a cynic. Eventually, I realized that she could have been right and if pressed in the past few years to decide whether I were an optimist or a pessimist I would have chosen the latter. I accepted that fact with a distinct longing for my former optimisim. Now, I am starting to realize that this is a false choice, that it's perfectly possible to be both.