Why optimism?

Fair question. There are undoubtedly dark clouds on the horizon and we’d be lying if we said all is well on the Pale Blue Dot.

It’s hard to find even a grain of positivity when wicked problems seem around every corner. No wonder existential anxiety is on the rise.

But despite all the uncertainty, there’s one thing we each have control over: how we personally choose to respond to these challenges. This is why Kevin Kelly’s words are so important to us.

“Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.“

If Kevin is right, optimism isn’t just simply about ‘being positive’. It’s a pragmatic response to the huge challenges we’re facing as a species.

To embrace optimism is to own our future.

“But this time it’s different”

You may be thinking: that’s all well and good, but today’s challenges are different. The damage on its way is irreversible, and we’re going to need more than wishful thinking to counter it.

This isn’t wrong. But the optimism we’re talking about doesn’t deny this reality. We’re not suggesting for a minute that we close our eyes and pretend ‘it’s all going to be OK’. This kind of blind optimism is perhaps the most dangerous of all.

What we’re talking about is going through the next decade with our eyes open and welcoming the challenges. Only by being curious and better understanding these problems will we start to see new ways of solving them.

Fucked and unfuckable

Nobody’s saying this is easy. But, as F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote…

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Or more crudely: everything is fucked but at the same time unfuckable.

Let’s not forget that we humans have repeatedly done the seemingly impossible. And this gives us every right to believe we can do it again. To do this, we need to choose our response – we say let’s choose optimism.

The goal for this little event is to encourage you to make that choice too. Because things will get really interesting when this kind of optimism spreads. This might seem a lofty goal for a small one-day event, but we feel the conversations we’ll have on 27 June 2025 are a great place to start.