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1 [1] >Westenberg. [MENU] [3] 1. About [4] 2. Self [5] 3. RSS [6] 4. Tools [7] 5. 2 YouTube [8] 6. Forum | [9] / Search | [10] → Sign in [11] + Subscribe 3 STATUS // operational 4 Westenberg. | v1.0 | 2026 5 2026-04-12 // 6 min read 6 7 Optimism is not a personality flaw 8 9 AUTHOR // [12]JA Westenberg ACCESS // true 10 Optimism is not a personality flaw Photo by [13]Cherry Laithang / [14]Unsplash 11 12 On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik - and the United States 13 lost its collective mind. Newspapers ran headlines about Soviet nuclear weapons 14 raining from orbit, and schools held duck-and-cover drills. Eisenhower's 15 approval rating cratered and the smartest people in Washington agreed that 16 America had fallen behind, for good, the free world was in terminal decline, 17 and their enemies were about to launch space-faring Nukes. 18 19 Then, eleven years and 8 months later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. 20 One small step, etc. 21 22 Folks in 1957 had at least some reason to be afraid, and the fear was grounded 23 in something real: you could measure the gap in rocket technology down to the 24 pound of thrust. But the people who responded to that fear by building things 25 (the Apollo program, the engineers who decided the problem was solvable) landed 26 on the moon. The people who responded by predicting doom were forgotten before 27 the decade was out. 28 29 I can't think of a better summary of the argument I'm trying to make here... 30 31 In the last 15 years, a specific kind of intellectual posture has taken hold 32 everywhere. I've started calling it "competitive pessimism" - which might not 33 be perfect, but it's the best I've got. 34 35 Whoever can list the most reasons something won't work gets treated as the 36 smartest person in the room. If you say "I think this could go well," you get 37 ~the look. That slight tilt of the head. Optimism is treated like a belief in 38 astrology. 39 40 Pessimism reads as intelligence now. 41 42 Optimism reads as naivety. 43 44 This has gotten so baked into educated Western culture that most people don't 45 notice they're doing it. But it's toxic, all the same. 46 47 Where this came from 48 49 The instinct has some logic to it, I'll be fair about that. 50 51 The 21st century opened with the dot-com crash, which wiped $5 trillion off the 52 NASDAQ between March 2000 and October 2002. Then September 11th, and the 53 Afghanistan War, and then the Iraq War. Then the 2008 financial crisis, which 54 destroyed 8.7 million American jobs in eighteen months. Then Obama! And then 55 Trump. Then a pandemic that killed over a million people in the US alone. 56 Climate reports from the IPCC kept landing, each one worse. If you paid 57 attention to any of this, bracing for impact started to look like base common 58 sense. 59 60 The internet of course poured a gasoline on all of it. In 2012, Jonah Berger 61 and Katherine Milkman at Wharton went through about seven thousand New York 62 Times articles and tracked which ones readers actually emailed to their 63 friends. The anxious // angry pieces won. The hopeful writing just sort 64 of...sat there. The platforms didn't need an academic paper to work this out. 65 Doom = clicks. Doom = ad revenue. Doom got you a booking on Joe Rogan. 66 Pessimists built media empires, and optimists built water treatment plants in 67 sub-Saharan Africa and nobody wrote a magazine cover about them. 68 69 Pessimism is useful and I won't be glib about that. You want a pessimist 70 reviewing the specs on the I-35W bridge before it goes up. You want a pessimist 71 reading your bloodwork. Risk assessment is a discipline that saves lives every 72 single day. What happened over the last two decades is that risk assessment 73 slid from being a discipline into being a disposition; worry stopped being 74 something you ~did and became something you ~were. 75 76 And that's where the trouble started. 77 78 What the doomers predicted 79 80 In 1894, the Times of London published a calculation: at current rates of 81 growth, the city's streets would be buried under nine feet of horse manure by 82 the 1940s. The math was technically on the money: fifty thousand horses working 83 in London at the time, each producing 15 to 35 pounds of dung per day, with a 84 population growing...the arithmetic pointed one way. 85 86 What nobody at the Times knew was that Karl Benz, tinkering in a shop in 87 Mannheim, had already patented a gasoline-powered vehicle eight years earlier. 88 The car scaled up, the manure problem disappeared and a completely different 89 set of problems showed up in its place. 90 91 Thomas Malthus did the same thing a century earlier, in his 1798 Essay on the 92 Principle of Population. Population grows geometrically, food arithmetically, 93 and therefore - famine is mathematically inevitable. He published this at the 94 start of the Agricultural Revolution. Paul Ehrlich doubled down in 1968: "The 95 battle to feed all of humanity is over," he wrote on page one of The Population 96 Bomb, "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." 97 98 Well, food production tripled instead. 99 100 Peak oil in 2005, same story; the doomsday logic was always internally 101 consistent. The world just did not cooperate. 102 103 I know I'm cherry-picking here. Listing reversals is easy. Plenty of problems 104 didn't get fixed. Plenty of hopeful people were dead wrong. But the doomers 105 were also wrong, and the doomers didn't build anything while they were busy 106 ~being wrong. 107 108 The optimists who failed at least generated attempts. 109 110 This is the asymmetry I keep snagging on. 111 112 Why it feels smart to be grim 113 114 In 1984, a psychologist at Berkeley named Philip Tetlock started cornering 115 experts at conferences and asking them to make specific, testable predictions. 116 117 • Would the Soviet Union collapse within five years? 118 • Would inflation top 6%? 119 120 He accumulated tens of thousands of these forecasts from 284 political 121 scientists, economists, and government advisors, and after twenty years he 122 scored them all against reality. Most of the experts performed about as well as 123 "dart-throwing chimpanzees" -- Tetlock's line, not mine. The very worst 124 forecasters were the folks with One Grand Theory™️ who bent all incoming data 125 to fit it. 126 127 Nobody puts the careful, uncertain forecasters on television. 128 129 "I see arguments on both sides and I'm not confident" doesn't fill a segment. 130 131 This is an ongoing complaint of mine. 132 133 And then there's the reputation factor. If you predict a catastrophe and you're 134 wrong, nobody circles back to check - and your wrong call just dissolves. If 135 you predict things will work out and they don't, that shit follows you around 136 forever. The lopsidedness of the payoff alone is enough to push smart, careful 137 people toward the darkest possible forecast even when the evidence is genuinely 138 mixed. 139 140 Being wrong about doom costs you nothing. 141 142 Being wrong about hope costs you your career. 143 144 Hope as a decision 145 146 Cornel West split optimism and hope into two separate things... 147 148 • Optimism is a spectator sport, in his framing. You watch the data and 149 decide whether the trend lines look good. 150 • Hope is a commitment to act as though improvement is possible, because 151 without that commitment you guarantee it isn't. Nobody serious is claiming 152 things will get better on their own. In fact, things can only get better if 153 enough people act as though they might. 154 155 Every hospital that got built started with someone saying "we can treat those 156 people." Every civil rights movement and every vaccine that reduced suffering 157 began with someone who looked at a bad situation and decided to treat it as a 158 problem to solve, and a problem that ~could be solved. 159 160 "What about the problems that didn't get solved? What about the optimists who 161 were wrong?" 162 163 Well, what about them? 164 165 The optimists who were wrong still attempted something. 166 167 The pessimists who were right attempted nothing. 168 169 And the world runs on attempts, not on accurate // profound predictions of 170 failure. 171 172 The permanent bracing costs 173 174 At the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman spent decades studying what 175 he called "learned helplessness." He found that people who explain bad events 176 as permanent and personal, baked into the fabric of reality, are more likely to 177 become depressed and less likely to keep trying. I should know. That about 178 accurately describes my emotional state for most of my 20's. 179 180 The cultural pessimism that passes for intelligence has the same structure - if 181 your default explanation for every problem is "systems are broken and people 182 are selfish, so nothing will ever be different," you've adopted a worldview 183 that is indistinguishable from despair, and you might call it realism but it 184 produces the same behavior as hopelessness. 185 186 When pessimism becomes the default in public conversation, it starts building 187 the world it claims to be describing. People who believe nothing can be 188 different don't vote, don't volunteer, don't start companies, don't run for 189 office, don't build the thing that might have mattered. 190 191 Pessimism at scale is a self-fulfilling prophecy. 192 193 Rebecca Solnit put it well in Hope in the Dark: "Hope is not a lottery ticket 194 you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is something you do." 195 196 The stubborn, irrational case 197 198 In 1903, Simon Newcomb - a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins and 199 probably the most credentialed scientist in the country - wrote a widely-read 200 essay arguing that powered heavier-than-air flight was a practical 201 impossibility. And on December 17 of that same year, Wilbur and Orville Wright 202 flew four times at Kitty Hawk. The longest flight lasted 59 seconds and covered 203 852 feet. Newcomb never revised his position. 204 205 Pessimism is more accurate in the short term - almost always, I'll give it 206 that. Things do go wrong in roughly the ways people predict they will. But 207 optimism is more productive over decades. Optimism is the thing that generates 208 attempts, and without attempts nothing changes. 209 210 Blind cheerfulness ignores evidence, crashes planes, builds the Humane AI Pin 211 and bankrupts companies. Nobody wants that. But the choice to look at bad data 212 and act anyway, because sitting still is the one move that guarantees the bad 213 outcome, is a noble one. 214 215 The most dangerous idea I keep running into is that there is nothing to be 216 done. It's the one idea that, if enough people hold it, comes true - and I 217 refuse to treat that as a serious intellectual position. I refuse to let Quiet 218 Quitting become the dominant intellectual model of our age. 219 220 I would rather be wrong about what we're capable of than right about why we 221 shouldn't bother trying... 222 223 $ whois studio-self 224 225 Westenberg is designed, built and funded by Studio Self. 226 227 We make tech legible. 228 229 [15]Work with us. 230 $ cat ./comments 231 $ cat ./subscribe.md 232 233 Get updates 234 235 Field Notes on Now. 236 237 [16][ ] SUBSCRIBE_ 238 [18]About/// [19]Self/// [20]RSS/// [21]Tools/// [22]YouTube/// [23]Forum/// 239 [24]About/// [25]Self/// [26]RSS/// [27]Tools/// [28]YouTube/// [29]Forum/// 240 [30]About/// [31]Self/// [32]RSS/// [33]Tools/// [34]YouTube/// [35]Forum/// 241 [36]About/// [37]Self/// [38]RSS/// [39]Tools/// [40]YouTube/// [41]Forum/// 242 © 2026 Westenberg. 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