optimism

06 Oct, 2024

“My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.”
—David Sipress, political cartoonist

Dilemma

1. Design is how I make a living
2. Design requires information and creativity
   a. Good design requires information
   b. Information begets pessimism
   c. Creativity requires optimism
3. A designer must somehow transcend pessimism in order to be both informed and optimistic enough to solve problems effectively

But how?

Facts

1. the best design is well informed
   a. the purpose of design is to solve problems
   b. in order to solve problems you need information
   c. designing solutions also requires creativity
2. creativity requires optimism
   a. you have to believe in a solution that doesn’t exist yet in order to keep trying to create it
   b. you have to trust your own ability to find a good solution without giving up
   c. you have to feel confident that you have sufficient information to solve the problem effectively

Conflict

1. but to stay well informed you must subject yourself to the daily horrors happening all around us
2. and being world weary will turn you into a pessimist
3. furthermore, the more you know, the more you realize how little you know

Exhibits

1. there are creative people who are blissfully ignorant whose work doesn’t solve much due to being uninformed
2. there are creative people who are well informed but too consumed with doubt to be very creative
3. there are creative people who are well informed yet manage to find joy, beauty, and the promise of better days so that they can have the optimism to create

Solutions

1. do what you can to help others as much as possible so you can regain a sense of hope and see a light or a path forward
2. find the silver lining, joy, gratitude, and beauty even in dark situations
3. effect positive change with your design work

NOT Solutions

1. toxic positivity*
2. ignorance; avoidance
3. only service; no work

Why this? Why now?

The world is burning, and I can't look away. My own personal world is far from ideal, but I have to keep working to make ends meet.

Happiness is a choice. It takes effort. The default reaction to all this negativity is too dark to imagine.

*On finding the joy: To borrow from a voice I've come to appreciate, Suleika Jaouad:

For the last few months, small joys have been my sustenance… Often these small moments fade from view with the passage of time. What makes it into our memory banks are the bigger things—either the zeniths or the nadirs—but what we end up longing for and leaning on in hard times are the little quotidian comforts and delights; they lift and carry us from day to day. Noting these joys is a muscle I’ve been consciously trying to exercise: training the eye to see them and training the mind to hold onto them.

I do want to make a distinction here between the practice of celebrating small joys and the culture of “toxic positivity,” where we’re told to be ever-grateful, to always search for the silver linings, to put a positive spin on all experiences, even the profoundly tragic. The author Barbara Ehrenreich has written critically about this cultural phenomenon with far more nuance than I can in this missive, but it’s a topic I’ve thought a lot about, especially in these last months. It’s easy to feel pressure to be someone who “suffers well”—grateful and graceful and stoic 24/7. But that doesn’t allow us to exist fully, to experience the full range of the human condition, from happiness to grief, from gratitude to envy.

I love observing tiny daily joys because it feels natural and easy, not forced, not pressurized, not all or nothing. And not only has the practice helped ease this difficult passage, it’s helped me identify what lifts me up, and then I can cultivate more of it.