#66: Optimism means taking agency over your life

Interesting thoughts on fear and pessimism and lessons from a physicist

Hi, friends!

Readers have shared that my writing has improved a lot, since starting this newsletter over a year ago. Readers have also noticed that I am weaving in storytelling — and they really like it.

This makes me really happy to hear. I am grateful for the opportunity to sit at my laptop every day and do meaningful work. Thank you, to all of you, for opening my posts when they land in your inbox. It is truly a privilege to share.

With that said, some days it’s harder than others to not compare myself to other online writers; to the people who have a bigger audience, who get more likes and comments, who have more public influence. But I have to remind myself that writing online is not a sprint. It is a marathon. A journey.

The ideas that I write about are driven entirely by my interests and curiosity. I don’t have a manager or a boss telling me what stories to write about. I don’t have an editor who scraps half of my writing and tells me to write the story differently because the audience wants to read this other story and not the one I wrote. Don’t get me wrong —editors can be wonderful and helpful, but oftentimes what happens at media companies is that the interest of the writer is disconnected from the interest of the media company. The media company wants to get as many eye balls as possible on a piece of writing and they create subjective constraints that can stifle the creativity of a writer and the realness of a post. For example, an editor at a media company may scrap humor or honest storytelling. They can scrap the writer’s voice. And if a writer loses their voice, well, all that’s left is what some algorithm tells the boss that people want to read.

You get the point. It’s an incentive problem. It’s what happens what an organization gets too big and too bureaucratic. Work becomes managing the bureaucracy rather than generating value. For a media company, the value should be quality writing. Quality storytelling. Good journalism. But what we have today is much more Pavlovian— writing that is driven by quick dopamine hits to the reader a.k.a sensationalized, fear mongering headlines that activate the most primitive parts of our brain.

The part of our brain that wants to click on the headline out of fear, rather than out of interest and curiosity. The part of our brain that operates from a scarcity mindset, rather than an abundance mindset. The part of our brain that stocks up on toilet paper at the grocery store when there is a hurricane warning —or a pandemic— or that sells crypto investments—or that stocks up on gas at the fueling station when we read predictions about gas shortages.

Jason Crawford, who runs a popular nonprofit blog Roots of Progress takes a crack at explaining our panic behavior. It’s really fascinating, but before I get to his theory about human behavior I want to share a quick aside.

A few days ago, I watched a Netflix documentary Night on Earth about animals in the night time in the African Savannah. As you can probably imagine, it’s intense. The animals are predatory and during the night, when it’s less hot, animals go off to hunt and kill their prey. Nighttime, in the African Savannah, is not safe. No animal is safe. Some animals don’t even sleep at night because shut eye likely means death.

It’s intense. It’s brutal. And the whole time, I was thinking, wow, I am so glad to be a human. But, at the same time, are we humans much different than these animals? Are the fear centers of our brains that much far off from animals? Don’t we also make decisions out of a place of fear? Like when we stock up on toilet paper, or gas, or worry about inflation. What are we afraid of though? What’s the worst thing that will happen? Surely, in 2022, we won’t die. Maybe in 1022, when we also lived on the African savannah, we would die…but not today.

So, then, why do we operate so often from a place of fear?

Jason Crawford has a theory that it’s because “pessimism sounds smart.” He writes:

I’ve realized a new reason why pessimism sounds smart: optimism often requires believing in unknown, unspecified future breakthroughs—which seems fanciful and naive. If you very soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and the proven, you will necessarily be pessimistic.

No proven resources or technologies can sustain economic growth. The status quo will plateau. To expect growth is to believe in future technologies. To expect very long-term growth is to believe in science fiction.

Wow. This is brilliant. To be an optimist is to believe in the unknown, and to be a pessimist is to believe in the known and the proven.

Pessimists complain and worry and fear the current landscape. Optimists go out and solve problems so the pessimists fears don’t come true!

Like peoples fears of Peak Oil and resource shortages.

Fears of Peak Oil and other resource shortages follow this pattern. Predictions of shortages are typically based on “proven reserves.” We are saved from shortage by the unproven and even the unknown reserves, and the new technologies that make them profitable to extract. Or, when certain resources really do run out, we are saved economically by new technologies that use different resources: Haber-Bosch saved us from the guano shortage; kerosene saved the sperm whales from extinction; plastic saved the elephants by replacing ivory.

I want to make clear that I don’t believe that technology is a panacea. And if probed, I bet Jason doesn’t believe this either. He’s actually just taking ideas from the legendary physicist David Deutsch, a.k.a. The Great Explainer, and his book The Beginning of Infinity.

Deutsch is a giant optimist, which is what I think happens to anyone working on the bleeding edge of solving society’s biggest problems.

Here’s some of Jason and David’s optimistic wisdom about the future of humanity:

Why is this style of pessimism repeatedly wrong? How can this optimism be justified? Not on the basis of specific future technologies—which, again, are unproven—but on the basis of philosophical premises about the nature of humans and of progress. The possibility of sustained progress is a consequence of the view of humans as “universal explainers” (cf. David Deutsch), and of progress as driven fundamentally by human choice and effort—that is, by human agency.

But if progress is a primarily matter of agency, then whether it continues is up to us.

So, yeah, being an optimist is a choice. It comes down to taking agency over your life and solving problems.

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Take care, my friends! I hope you stay optimistic ☀️ And take it easy on the pessimists. It’s the optimistic thing to do ✨