Optimism, on the other hand, is a toxin to be avoided. Optimism is a subgenre of fatalism, the belief that things will get better no matter what we do. It's just the obverse of pessimism. Both are ways of denying human agency. To be an optimist is to be a passenger of history, along for the ride, with no hope of changing its course.
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@pluralistic I love the message of hope, but what do every day schlubs like me do to make a difference?
@nehal3 Join EFF and other groups and political movements so you can be part of a polity and not just an atomized individual.
@pluralistic i actively choose hope over despair every single day. Some days are easier than others. And every day is a new opportunity to choose it again.
@pluralistic this is brilliant 🩷
Thank you so much for sharing 🩷
@pluralistic Thanks for that. Some days it feels like hope is about as abundant as toilet paper during COVID.
Had to look up the other two words as I forgot what they meant.
Happiness is self-explanatory - and fleeting. Even in the worst of times, there are moments of happiness - a delicious meal with friends, a beautiful sunrise, a stolen moment with your love. These are the things we chase, and rightly so. But happiness is always a goal, rarely a steady state.
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fig1. applied #happiness in action 👆 👇 https://mastodon.au/@Heliograph/115901053139315699 
@pluralistic
Optimism, on the other hand, is a toxin to be avoided. Optimism is a subgenre of fatalism, the belief that things will get better no matter what we do. It's just the obverse of pessimism. Both are ways of denying human agency. To be an optimist is to be a passenger of history, along for the ride, with no hope of changing its course.
@pluralistic Since I heard you mention this in your 39c3 talk, I've been using that phrasing with hope. Then continuing the conversation focusing on the taking action part. A little phrasing that's helping people make the mental switch. I've never really been optimistic my entire, but I work hard everyday at being hopeful.
@pluralistic ( #optimism - in small doses - is helpful tho, to get through certain phases or periods in life (eg. sickness))
But hope? That's the stuff. Hope's the belief that if we change the world for the better, even by just a *little*, that we will ascend a gradient towards a better future, and as we rise up that curve, new terrain will be revealed to us that we couldn't see from our lower vantage-point. It's not necessary - or even possible - to see a course from here to the world you want to live in. You can get there in stepwise fashion, one beneficial change at a time:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/03/hope-not-optimism/
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@pluralistic Hope is also a 4 letter word.
These days, I am often unhappy, but I am *filled* with hope.
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a speech, "The Post-American Internet," at the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
In that talk, I laid out the case for hope. So many of the worst aspects of modern life can be traced to our enshittified technology, from mass surveillance and totalitarian control to wage suppression and conspiratorial cults.
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This enshittified technology, in turn, is downstream of policy decisions made by politicians who were bullied into their positions by the US trade rep, who used the threat of tariffs to push for laws that protected the right of tech giants to plunder the world's money and data, by criminalizing competitors who disenshittified their products, leaving technology users defenseless.
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Trump's tariffs have effectively killed that threat. If you can't tell from day to day - let alone year to year - whether the US will accept your exports, you can't rely on exporting to the USA. What's more, generations of pro-oligarch policies have stripped America's bottom 90% of discretionary income, stagnating their wages and leaving them mired in health, education, and housing debt:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations
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