By Tyler Quigley
Artwork by Eric Kim, Design Lead

“Are you a glass half-empty or glass half-full kind of person?” is a question that most people have heard at least once in their life, even if it wasn’t framed in this exact manner. Asking someone if they are a pessimist or an optimist is often used as a personality gauge for individuals, a warm-up to what one should expect from an individual. People who are optimistic are often characterized as naïve yet happy, blissfully unaware of the problems of the world around them, while pessimists are painfully aware of the world’s issues and forced into a constant negative mindset. While these are exaggerations, the core differences between optimists and pessimists are as clear as day.

What has also become clear is that over the course of this decade, optimism has decayed and a mini-rebirth of wide-scale pessimism has taken over. A GALLUP poll conducted in December of 2009 states that 63% of Americans described their outlook of the United States over the next 20 years as optimistic or very optimistic. Compare this to another GALLUP poll conducted in January of 2022, which states that 58% of Americans are pessimistic about the pandemic improving, in spite of health officials stating the pandemic is easing up. So what changed? Where did our optimism go, and how do we get it back?

The knee-jerk reaction is that there is nothing to be optimistic about. Everything being shown on the news is terrible and depressing, and so everything in the world is terrible and depressing. The reason this line of thinking is ineffective is because there is an overwhelming amount of good news that happens every day that never gets noticed because it doesn’t sell as well. The lack of sales stems from the fact that most good things that happen are very gradual over time and don’t seem very impressive to the average reader when compared to the immediacy of negative events. Thus, people don’t know about the good things happening in the world; furthermore, when they are pressed about these events, they often answer pessimistically. A poll conducted by Our World In Data in 2015 asked people from dozens of nations about whether or not they thought global poverty had risen or dropped over the past 20 years 52% of participants stated that global poverty had gotten worse, with 28% saying that it stayed the same or that they did not know and only 20% stating that it went down. In reality, global poverty had dropped from 67.5% in 1995 to 46.0% in 2015. Despite this heartening achievement, people assumed the worst. There are plenty of positive things happening in the world, and yet we choose to focus on the negative – even when positive things do happen, most people don’t
notice. Why?

The logical conclusion to this question is seemingly that the bad in the world has become more prominent than the good in the world, thus making optimism unrealistic. This narrative is much stronger than the first example and cannot simply be disproven through statistics. This is a feeling that many people throughout the world, especially younger people, share, and simply showing them statistics about what good is going on is not going to change their minds. As someone who thinks of themselves as optimistic, I would like to share my perspective on why I feel this pessimism is harmful for both the self and society as a whole. I can absolutely sympathize with the idea that the sheer number of terrible things happening in the world overpowers the good. If nothing else, the past six years have proven this: two tumultuous elections, a two-year-long pandemic that has crippled the world and so many generation-defining events all blend together into a mass of tragedy. However, I think these events lead to a marvelous revelation about humanity: we bounced back. Absolutely, things were lost along the way – jobs , lives, the formalities of society -but we are still here.

And throughout all of this, I see people making an attempt to be better. I see people trying to make the best of the hand this world has dealt them, bettering themselves and helping others while they’re at it. This is why I’m optimistic, and why everyone should be too. Pessimism prevents people from bettering themselves; it feeds an obsession with how things could be better and prevents them from actually making the world better. The decay of optimism doesn’t have to be permanent. In fact, I think this decade is the time we return to our long-gone optimism and shove pessimism out of our lives. Hopefully, this isn’t too optimistic of me to think.