“It’s hard enough to create something good deliberately and with intention. And it’s no guarantee just because we believe something can happen, it will happen. But we know that unless we believe something can happen, it will not happen inadvertently by itself. And so it becomes really important that we imagine a world that we want, that we imagine solutions we want and believe that we can make them happen.”
—Kevin Kelly
It’s not always easy to stay optimistic. Our modern news cycle bombards us with all the bad. Both because it makes money and it’s the reality. Bad things happen every day. Author, technologist, and philosopher Kevin Kelly inspired me with his thoughts on why it’s so important to be an optimist1.
There is lots of good, but it’s easy to miss. Here’s why.
“Most progress is what does not happen.”
We forget about the diseases that have been cured, the famine that we do not experience (in most countries), or the fact that it no longer takes six weeks to travel from NYC to Chicago. Mostly, we don’t wake up worrying about the meat we need to cure or vegetables we need to can to survive the winter. We’ve made progress.
“Bad things happen faster than good things. Good things take time. “
“When we are compressing our news cycle to the things that have changed in the last five minutes, all the things that have changed in the last five minutes are bad because good stuff takes longer. If we were to make newspapers every 100 years, we would have different headlines.” -Kevin Kelly
Our lives are similar. Negative micro-events over a day or week can add up and impact perspective and attitude. Usually, if we look at our overall progress, we are better than we were ten years ago - in who we are, the quality of our lives, and our ability to continue to make progress.
We have this nasty habit of moving our expectations. That’s likely not to change. Just recognize it when you do it. It’s easy to forget that the life we wanted ten years is the life we have today.
“Societies are capable of creating a few percent better than they destroy each year.”
It doesn’t always seem like it, but now is the best time to be alive. Ever.
People live longer and have more access to better healthcare, education, and more ‘free’ time than ever. Is it still unacceptable that 200K people died of malnutrition in 2019? Absolutely. But that is down from 600K in 1990.
The small percentage you and I improve each year helps make society better. If we can each do our small part in our circle to make things better, we continue the momentum of progress. Put that way, we each have a moral responsibility to get better today than yesterday.
How can we apply this to ourselves:
Recognize the good.
We tend to recognize the bad because it’s a threat. You have done decades of work to get things the good that is in your life now. The skills, the security, and the possibilities. Recognize that.Greatness takes time.
Be patient and focus on what you can do over a decade with the proper habits and priorities. Thinking of your life in terms of decades is hard, and that’s why so few people are willing to do the work that leads to greatness - whatever that means to them.Nothing will happen if you don’t try.
Kevin Kelly says, “No matter what your temperament is, you can still choose to be optimistic. And gigantic problems require gigantic optimism. We have a moral obligation to be optimistic because when we’re optimistic, we can shape the future, we can become better ancestors, we can expand our reach --create things bigger than ourselves.”
Let’s all be good ancestors.
Take care,
NEXT:
A Gentle Reminder
Kevin Kelly’s TED talk has been viewed ~2.3M times and is worth 9 minutes of your life. https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_the_future_will_be_shaped_by_optimists?language=en
Shaping the Future with Optimism: 3 Key Takeaways from Kevin Kelly's Inspiring TED Talk