Cheer up, son!

Power, pessimism, and the madness of more.

Jul 04, 2026

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Optimism and pessimism are misunderstood.

Pessimists are cast with an air of misanthropy and gloom. Optimists assume a sunny, can-do mantle.

This does not map onto the lived experience of either.

Optimists are burdened with all that accompanies the firmly held belief that things could be better. Problem-solving is not for the faint-hearted.

Building new systems requires experience with old ones. It requires analysis, falsification, troubleshooting, and the cloying knowledge that each new venture into hopeful darkness may bring only fatigue and failure.

Optimists are overworked, underpaid, and driven by a conviction that the heartache wrought by dead ends, stolen valour, or the comfortable myopia of pessimists is worth it.

Where the pessimist rocks back in his swivel chair, comfortable that a certain level of discomfort may be more tolerable than the unknown, optimists crawl up the walls of our world’s most proud and protected enterprises for the opportunity to sell lateral thinking for as much as a handshake and a reference.

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Optimists find each other, as do pessimists. They can work together. They can benefit each other tremendously. In their extremes, they do not mix easily.

Optimists create systems for pessimists to concrete in. Consider the oligarch, and consider his heirs, and his heirs’ heirs. Consider his heirs’ heirs’ heirs. Consider the pessimism necessarily baked into the bones of enterprises whose sole mandate is to preserve the dignity and the dreams of the dead.

Pessimists preside over those systems until they’re no longer fit for purpose, hiring on a pessimistic basis that encourages the reinforcement of crumbling superstructures.

Pessimists settle for the security of the known, their own security paramount, which is often retrofitted into assertions about the systems they preside over promising a better way for all. Optimists trade insecurity for the promise of net growth in security for all, an inversion of the pessimist’s fear-based, self-centred priorities.

We must thank our optimists, too many of whom go mad. They’re out there, seething into the night: there must be a better way.

The optimist knows what the pessimist must reject to survive: there must be an instrument undesigned, waiting to be wielded, searing the sides of our collective imagination, ready to be assembled into a recycling plant, a vaccine, a cobalt replacement, or a defence against some phenomenal, inhumane structure.

And on those rare occasions that optimists produce objectively better designs than those in use, they must then convince a pessimistic world that the cost of adoption is lower than the cost of business as usual.

In a pessimistic world, one where business as usual sings a sweeter tune than hope, the bright-eyed caricature we push onto our optimists could not be further from the truth.

And yet there they go, chipping away at the foundations of thought-factories whose tired, tawdry brickwork forever sings out:

“Cheer up, son, this is as good as it gets.”

Yeah. It’s not. Optimistically, it is not.

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