[atdt]

Please share this with someone who doesn't know the story yet. Ingenuity alone can't save our species. We also need the will to do good. We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems. Let this be a reminder of what we are capable of.

[carlosft]

> We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems.

I have no doubt that we can create a really miraculous future. I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.

[jackyinger]

Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good.

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.

[overfeed]

I mostly agree with what you said, but disagree on one point:

> 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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine

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.

[overfeed]

From the Oxford dictionary:

op·ti·mism (noun): hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something.

[JumpCrisscross]

The term has a philosophical heritage way richer than a dictionary one liner. I’m using one that makes OP’s statement make sense.

[kiba]

Wouldn't say optimism is irrational. There are good things happening in the world in spite of all the bad things in the world.

Pessimism that leads to a self fulfilling prophecy is irrational, but you still need a win. A win is fuel.

[quesera]

Choosing a belief that is more desirable than the most likely case, is by definition irrational, and can be called optimistic.

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.

[quesera]

> Cultivating optimism is the first step

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. :)

[hn_acc1]

I had a lot of optimism as a teenager in the 80s. And maybe even more during Obama's presidency. Then 2016, 2020, 2024-2026 hit, and I'm at like -89% for optimism.

[mmooss]

> Optimism is irrational

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.

[pluralmonad]

Pessimism and optimism are philosophical perspectives (dispositions) and do not necessarily have anything do with doing good or doing bad. Why do you think optimism only precipitates good things? Surely you can imagine a situation (or many) where thinking more positively about a situation than the data warrants leads to bad outcomes?

[mmooss]

> Surely you can imagine a situation (or many) where thinking more positively about a situation than the data warrants leads to bad outcomes?

We're not talking about hypotheticals - we can always construct hypotheticals that yield the answer we desire - but the real world.

[pluralmonad]

None of your examples above tie directly to an optimistic disposition. How could you possibly know the disposition of the thousands of humans involved in those endeavors? You are letting your personal disposition color your view of the world (as we all do) and mistaking this for some sort of absolute truth.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

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.

[XorNot]

Okay but also we all still live in democracies, and people are fairly obviously getting what they vote for a lot of the time.

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.

[secos]

You do not need optimism to do good. It helps motivate, but its not required.

[ryandrake]

> I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.

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.

[D-Coder]

For news about things that are going right, I suggest https://fixthenews.com/. You can get a free weekly email about progress in energy and the environment, national economies, health and medicine, crime etc (or pay for a longer weekly email).

[satvikpendem]

As they say, pessimists sound smart, optimists get things done (and make money along the way, if that is the goal).

[kimmeld]

When the the only thing CEOs talk about for every new technology is how many people they are going to put out of work because of it, the collective desire for new technology and progress is understandably lessened.

[crancher]

That you have the mental capacity/structures/language to form the thought should indicate the trajectory you're caught up within. It's disappointing that everything not's resolved during the blip you're you but even a moderately long view provides evidence for optimism.

[titzer]

It will rewire the hard sacrifice of limiting individual wealth to less than a billion dollars per person. Trajectory of present indicates we won't be doing that soon.

[lostlogin]

It would be interesting to know what portion of people disagree with your suggested cap, and why.

[ge96]

It is interesting, I wonder is it possible to get so rich and be kind, probably examples. I'm the kind poor person myself even what money I have I have given too much of it away. In which case I'm a dumbass for doing so but yeah.

[lostlogin]

The Gates Foundation used to be something that gave me hope. The recent revelations have coloured that.

Maybe I need to to separate the art from the artist?

[JumpinJack_Cash]

> > The Gates Foundation used to be something that gave me hope. The recent revelations have coloured that.

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...

[tialaramex]

> Maybe I need to to separate the art from the artist?

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.

[ge96]

Yeah... I still listen to Drake for ex

[titzer]

In the US one can retire comfortably on $3 million without relying on Social Security. From the downvotes, it's crazy to me that people think a limit of 300 "ordinary people's" retirements is unreasonable.

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.

[BobaFloutist]

I would at the very least index it to inflation.

[arjie]

It's always been that way. People have wanted to do things and others have said "You want to do that? Before you do this?" and so on. The US moon landing was contemporaneous with Whitey On The Moon. There are people who constantly care about things and work on incremental improvements to them that slowly collectively yield an outcome. That's just the mechanism that works.

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.

[tialaramex]

Have you noticed you don't have Guinea Worms where you live?

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.

[satvikpendem]

This is a Western-centric and specifically Americentric viewpoint. There are plenty in the East for example who are not cynical about their ability to solve existential problems and are instead plowing ahead on solving them, such as massive investment in non-petroleum-based energy sources like solar, wind, and nuclear.

[wbobeirne]

Pessimism is not a uniquely American viewpoint.

"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_...

[satvikpendem]

I'm not talking about how people feel about their life or country but about the concrete actions their governments are taking to improve their quality of life. For example, they all have high speed rail, something that is essentially impossible to build in the US, whether it be due to budget, regulations or sheer political will.

[fragmede]

Florida's Brightline contradicts that, no matter how slow California's HSR project is going. Trust in greed if nothing else. The next one to go up will be LA to Las Vegas.