Where'd the Optimism Go?

Despite being a giant hater, I'm pretty optimistic. I'm leading with that because, in 2026, this feels like something that makes people assume that I'm either ignorant, a Republican, or just a Wildly Out Of Touch White Guy. Somewhere in the last two decades, optimism stopped being the default, and it's become increasingly rare.

I want to be sympathetic for those that aren't as optimistic. The pessimism makes sense. Life is worse today than it was for so many marginalized communities; women, queer folks, immigrants. My point isn't to deny that, but rather, to find where my optimism comes from in spite of all of that.

There have always been reasons to be pessimistic, and arguably much better ones than we've got now -- people have lived through plagues, drafts, depressions, and the expectation that the world will end in 2012. What I can't figure out is why the misery feels so universal right now. There are memes, and a general outlook online that you can just "gesture broadly" to justify one's misery, and people will understand.

The easy move is to blame all of it on politics, and I don't think that's the whole picture. Politics is part of it, obviously. But like, I don't think the federal government is effective enough to have this profound of an impact on people's morale. And I don't think all these people that are sharing this sentiment are politically informed.

I've been chewing on what else it might be thanks to Hank Green's new podcast, Humans. Early on, John makes this offhand point that being in favor of humans has somehow become counter-cultural, and that was the exact thing I'd been trying to put words to. Being optimistic out loud now reads as naive, like you aren't paying close enough attention.

So where's the bitterness coming from? One compelling explanation I've found is generational. Call it the American Dream. For a long while, each generation assumed they'd live a little better than their parents did, and I think we might be the first stretch where that's stopped being true. People are reckoning with the real possibility that they'll never own a home, never settle into the quiet neighborhood they grew up in, never trade in a car every few years. Different causes for each of these, sure, but stacked together they make for a reasonable explanation for the sourness. The deal we were promised isn't being held up.

The other explanation I keep bumping into is late stage capitalism: companies squeeze a little more out of us every year, forever, and we're the thing being squeezed. But "it's just capitalism" works the same way "gestures broadly" does -- a container big enough to hold every grievance, which makes it satisfying and basically useless as a diagnosis.

Maybe it's just that it's so freaking hot out all the time, and it's only getting hotter.

But if I had to bet on a single one, I'd put it on the algorithmic feeds themselves. Misery is the cheapest thing to broadcast and the most rewarding thing to perform. Say everything's shitty and you get nods, solidarity, a little hit of belonging; say you're hopeful and you get "must be nice" or like "priviledge check!" It's the same reason why Mr. Beast feels compelled to say that he can't afford McDonald's. And this online sentiment is spreading out into real life.

So maybe that's where the optimism went: nowhere. It just got quiet, because saying it out loud just got more costly. Still worthwhile though.