Pessimism works overtime. It has been five minutes to midnight for so long that it must all soon go wrong, unavoidably, inescapably. Statistically it's only a matter of time, not if, but when. Nitrogen in the air. Plastic in the oceans. Too hot summers. Refugees. Face masks. Rising sea levels. Crazy hurricanes. Countries with nuclear bombs they shouldn't have. Oddball conspiracy theorists. And fake news all around, everybody and their uncle now has made-up stuff to share. We’re living in the golden age of pessimism.
Except that we are not.
There are plenty of problems, troubles, challenges and dilemmas that cry out for a solution, that's crystal clear. But we are not exactly a blank slate. As a species, we have a well-documented history of awesome troubleshooting. In fact, we're so good at finding solutions to even the toughest challenges, that in this extra-large brain of ours we always find the drive to tackle the next impossible thing. It is our innate optimism, a congenital deep knowing inside informing us that one day we will get it figured out.
Except for one small detail. Everyone of us is born with a pre-wired knowledge that a single bad future incident will be inevitable. We’ll drop dead. We don't know when, but one day our own life will come to a full stop. Even though we're getting better and better at pushing that episode farther down the road, sooner or later we are going to die.
But, on the flip side: everything else that the dictionary does not define as hurricanes or earthquakes is avoidable. Which is not to suggest that things never go really, badly wrong, because clearly they do, all the time. But we also know that what seems inevitable today will one day no longer be unavoidable. And if it so happens that we ourselves will no longer be here to contribute to the solution, a next generation will.
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History is written by optimists & so is the future