The inimitable Hans Rosling[1] used to call himself a "possibilist":
People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious “possibilist”. That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.
• • •
In his book 'Factfulness' (definitely read it), he talks about "bad and better":
Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator. The baby’s health status is extremely bad and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen. After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical.
Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world.
The "bad and better" mental model works well in many scenarios. Particularly where people tend to become hyperbolic and think in only absolutes.
Rosling used to work in Mozambique, the poorest country in the world at that time. In his first year there he was the only doctor for a population of 300,000 (!) people. He writes further: in my second year, a second doctor joined me. We covered a population that in Sweden would have been served by 100 doctors, and every morning on my way to work I said to myself, "Today I must do the work of 50 doctors."
To overextend the metaphor, I try to see all the little systems of the world as incubator babies. Some of them are worsening, we may lose some, some are near perfect health... We can celebrate the improvements while simultaneously mourning the losses.
Sometimes you'll hear that a person is "complicated". Our emotional world can be layers of many tones, textures, timbres. I think that when we invite the emotional correlate of abstract visual art, it gives us an intellectual advantage. In terms of being able to mentally simulate multiple contrasting perspectives in parallel, it almost guarantees we'll land closer toward truthiness. The basic emotions are like representational art. Easier to digest, easier to understand, easier to handle... Cotton candy for your guts.
Suffice to say, we're richly rewarded when we couple intellectual understanding with emotional resonance.
What are your thoughts on engaging in social media (say this comment thread), it is so easy to forget there is (probably!) a living and breathing person on the other end. I made friends in gaming who have different worldviews and sometimes debates came up (say covid and vaccins) and the debates really changed attitudes and understanding. It has been such a difference than many debates here or on worse on reddit, or anywhere else.
It seems like people that are highly engaged in online conversations do so because they, consciously or not, think their contributions will pull the universe toward some goal. That goal might be "truth", "freedom", "absurdity", etc. (Uncovering those goals sounds like a really fun project.)
I think some of it also comes from status needs. Specifically, dominance.
I don't understand the lurker mindset whatsoever. It has to be how most people interact with the internet though, otherwise there would be 10's of thousands of comments on every post here. Ever since I started using the internet as a little kid I've felt the need to toss my thoughts into the cyber stream. I think all the word games I've played with other people online have truly made me a multitude.
All that is opposed to real life interactions. In real life, people sometimes just sit next to each other and occasionally share thoughts. It's a lot more like chat rooms instead of like social media. In a chat room, the facets of an individual are more prominent, meaning, as the chat continues, you witness how a person reasons through their ideas and feelings. Maybe he's a climate skeptic but oh hey, you love my favorite band, what!
The above multi-facetedness of irl and chat interaction is in contrast to this, what we're engaging in now. This comment I'm writing is an expression of a microscopic slice of time in my life and thoughts in my brain. But it's now reified. People can come back to it 10 years from now and play with it in their heads. I might be dead by then, or I might be a fascist or I might have become a Zen monk. The new eyes sipping my words have no clue, little context, of who I was an hour or a day ago, let alone a decade since.
No wonder we stumble into toxicity on social media. Not only are we probably trying to prove or achieve something, but its asynchronous nature causes weird second-order effects. Millions of people can read a Facebook post written in a fit of rage and fear with a migraine ripping through the body of the author at 3 in the morning, but suddenly, that psychologically, philosophically, sociologically, cosmically absolutely insignificant moment could cause ripples throughout the entire world. We're built by evolution to play joyous semantic games with each other. With social media we're trying to do the same, except our innocent flourishes are all punctuated with grenades and nuclear bombs.
Anyways, those are my thoughts on that. I'm very happy to hear that you found good people to share your esteem and friendship with. That's the dopest shit.
> I don't understand the lurker mindset whatsoever. It has to be how most people interact with the internet though, otherwise there would be 10's of thousands of comments on every post here.
I, for example, simply did not have any interesting thoughts to share most of the time and didn't bother commenting when I did have some. But you just changed my attitude towards that. Thanks! I even created an account here :)
I am probably going back to lukering to be honest.
I post in good faith, although sometimes I make stupid jokes and probably deserve the responses. But, it sucks when you put time into a comment and it gets trashed to hell with no responses telling you why.
HN is the hardest forum. People smell bullshit a mile away, everyone is super smart and informed, humor is suspect. I've never taken breaks from Reddit due to dejection. I've taken dozens of breaks from HN due to dejection... It does really hurt to get downvoted in a community of people you admire lol
If you think the convos are worth it, fuck it! Let the downvotes flow. Make it a game. But if it is causing you any sort of distress, there's other places online people will eagerly welcome you to.
Thanks man.
I dont do social media at all. I signed up here not too long ago. I have lurked here for a long time and learnt so much, decided it was time to take part.
I have thought about not giving a shit and "letting the downvotes flow", but then I would become the kind of poster I would not want to read either. and that Dang chap has lot more to deal with, than me getting butthurt.
Having had a premature baby, please don't: progress is rarely "linear". I agree that does not make the example inapplicable, it just makes it insensitive.
There are so many better examples to choose from that don't strike a personal nerve (at least, personal to this extent) with any of the audience. Or if your audience hasn't had this experience, it's a moot example that they can't really relate to.
First, the major one. Yes, it is an insensitive example so a better one should be one.
Secondly, regarding your comment regarding progress, human progress is also not linear. It's not even constantly and universally pointing in the right direction (there are frequent regressions, some bigger than others), let alone advancing at a constant speed.
I said as much: it's not inapplicable, just insensitive.
TL;DR: I am letting you know how this example made me feel. Take it any way you want.
It's so much easier for me to process any realist take on something that may have concerned my own health or my parents' health (we've all had serious health conditions), but shouts of the crowd "hey, we are empathizing" when it comes to premature babies makes me gulp (and my kid is doing great: what about those whose isn't?). Why don't we use kids with serious, life threatening conditions as examples too? Because those examples are too emotionally taxing.
It exactly feels like coming from someone who has not had a premature baby (or had a low risk one, as >80% of them are: babies coming out at 36 or even 33 weeks of gestation have a very low risk of any developmental issues and have high chances of survival, yet are still called "premature" — their parents are unlikely to have heard phrases like "it's so-and-so, you probably understand what this means" or "may become blind in a matter of days/hours", even though they've experienced a lot of psychological stress too).
If the goal is to trigger an emotional response, I think this is the wrong one. If the goal is to trigger a rational response, then anybody with a first-hand experience is going to have a hard time.
I am simply calling it out as I see it: find a better example, please.
With all due respect, and not taking anything away from your painful experience, I don't think a "better example" needs to be found. Why? The incubator analogy works precisely because it is so relatable—even to those who do not have kids. We should not rob people of such powerful analogies.
People shouldn't feel like they have to carefully walk on eggshells to use such analogies, all in the fear of offending someone. I hope you don't parse me wrong.
Well said. My response was going to be a lot less measured than this, and I would be an asshole for saying the first thing that popped into my head, so I am glad you got there before me.
To re-phrase what I was going to say in a more senensitive way, to the OP, to me this reads like (and really no offence), you would prefer for other people to miss out on good knowledge due to the small chance that someone may feel a little bit bad for a short time. Its a bit like a "think of the children" argument, but there aint no children here, well accept for me maybe.
I am sorry you had to go through that though.
Also the threads above this comment are some of the best I have read on here in the last month or 2, and there has been some seriously good content (to me at least), in that time.
What I am saying is that it is not relatable. It's obvious from some other comments in the thread (there is someone saying things like "we'll lose some" — I am not saying they are not right, just that they are not relating to it). Sure, some people will empathize, but most won't. I know I wouldn't before going through the experience.
To be honest, I don't even understand what's the need for an analogy here? Is it not clear to everyone that something can be both "bad" and becoming less bad ("better" or simply improving) at the same time? Does the analogy really help communicate that?
I mean, when I get a regular cold, when my nose starts being heavily congested (instead of leaking), I know I am bad, but improving. When you just get a job out of college, your financial situation might be "bad" (large student debt), but you've finally started paying it off ("bad and better"). Or your house is flooded ("bad"), but you've just arranged for the insurance to send someone to fix it up ("bad and better"). It's really trivial to come up with examples. None of these has any potential to trigger an emotional response the way (non-empathically, to me) talking of premature babies does.
It was used as a superfluous tool to attempt to trigger those "think of the children" emotions in people that the next commenter mentions (though they attempt to attribute that to me: I was actually saying "think of the parents" ;-)).
To me, an unnecessary analogy that does not consider how it will be perceived is anything but "powerful", but I also think it's fine for us to agree to disagree.
> People shouldn't feel like they have to carefully walk on eggshells to use such analogies
I totally agree. I don't see how that relates to me sharing how this particular analogy has made me feel: when we get to all the overly-politically-correct talk, it's usually people jumping to protect someone else who they think might be offended — here, I am sharing my own lived experience. That's a data point, and anyone can decide on their own whether that will influence their choice of analogy or not.
Is it really not valuable sharing these "data points" (all the replies I've gotten are surely making me second guess myself)? How do people learn about how people feel if they are not willing to listen to them? Do you change anything when you learn how you made people feel?
I don't want belabor the point here. But yes, we have to agree to disagree. There's nothing wrong with you sharing your difficult experience, of course. What I'm saying is that how the analogy will be "perceived" is irrelevant; that's the eggshells part I was referring to. What counts here is the effectiveness of it. You're essentially saying "regardless of how useful it is, we should ban this analogy because it might offend someone". If you go down that route, you would've been robbed of many of the greatest books and insights.
The incubator analogy is perfectly "relatable" (i.e. understandable) to many of us. Though, of course, not in the finest resolution that someone who has experienced the unfortunate situation. But all the same, it can be appreciated without losing the critical insights. Evolution has "programmed" us to understand these kind of analogies.
Rosling was a doctor, and an extremely sensible man.
There's a reason he picked that analogy; he knew what he was doing.
> [...] I don't even understand what's the need for an analogy here?
Yes, an analogy is required—that's how our minds make sense of many things in life. I strongly suggest to read the book "Metaphors We Live By"[1]. A classic from 40 years ago that shows how deep analogies and metaphors run in our bones. And no, a student debt or a leaky nose doesn't cut it; a powerful analogy like what Rosling used strikes a better chord with the topic at hand ("the state of the world").
To be blunt, your feelings are your problem. There is nothing wrong with that analogy. All yohr comment does is discourage people from trying to relate anything to common life experiences because someone might've had a bad one.
Analogies are a tool used to describe a situation by relating to something more familiar: are premature babies really something all of you "dissenting" voices have experienced? Analogies can trigger all sorts of responses (intellectual and emotional).
Whether you care about the responses of your audience is your choice. I am not disagreeing that my feelings are my own (though they are not a "problem" for me), but I am sharing them for the benefit of those who might care. If you don't, that's "your problem".
Being personally triggered by some random example doesn't entitle you to expect the world to avoid any references to it in other contexts. Simple as that. People use all sorts of examples for all sorts of discussions, any one of them could offend any random person for any number of personal reasons. The onus is on the offended party to understand that strangers don't owe them a damn thing when they're not even talking to them personally.
I ain't expecting anything. I think I've explained quite clearly that it strikes me as an insensitive example (from the way it affected me personally) where one could easily find others which are not. I would hope that people appreciate that, even if they won't honour it (I could even say "even if they disagree with it", but you can't really disagree with feelings).
Whether someone cares for that or not is, just the same, in their court.
This entire discussion seems to have turned into whether I should be even expressing what someone saying made me feel. If that's truly useless, I am totally socially inept (I am probably not far off), so that's a useful learning too.
This reminds me of something one of my history professors said. He's never really disappointed in life because he sets his expectations extremely low. If something exceeds those expectations, he's happy. If they don't, well, he didn't expect much of it to begin with so nothing really changes. He said it kind of tongue-in-cheek but it still sticks with me over a decade later.
Another good quote for the OP is Miguel De Cervantes, author if Don Quixote: "there is madness in too much sanity, and the greatest madness of all is to see things as they are instead of as they should be".
He would know: Cervantes killed a rival on a duel at 17 and fled to sea. They were attacked by pirates and he fought well before getting his hand blown off and taken prisoner. He lived in captivity but befriended his captor, who taught him chess and literacy. Then he was "rescued" by monks who bought his freedom but placed him on indentured servitude through debt, which he finally escaped by writing one of the early great novels.
The point of this story is not that cynics were wrong but that one never would have survived his ordeal. In a world fit for cynics, you have to be ready for things to go right if you want to escape.
> The point of this story is not that cynics were wrong but that one never would have survived his ordeal
It's interesting you'd use that story to make your point because about 2,000 years earlier Diogenes, the founder of Cynicism, was supposedly captured by pirates on the Mediterranean and sold into slavery. Not only did he survive but the man who purchased him was so impressed that he appointed him to run his household and tutor his children.
Leading upper-case Cynic philosophers exhibited a lot of behavior that might be called lower-case cynical today.
A criticism that is as old as Diogenes (at least Laertius) is that they were essentially a cult of edgelords. They pretended not to care what people thought, but it was just an act, at the same time it was really important to them that people around them knew how little they cared through all the shockingly (lower case) cynical things they said and did. DL has Plato accuse Diogenes of this directly. All this is reducing a philosophy to a trope, but it's not an entirely unfair accusation either.
Speaking of which, a bizarre and entertaining piece of history is Lucian's extremely hostile biography of Peregrinus Proteus.
If Diogenes was doing an act he was really into it.
He famously told Alexander the Great to fuck off and stop blocking the light (which leads me to think that the ultimate "fuck you money" is to have no money at all, and not want any).
He would also walk around the market and masturbate in public, which the Athenians found disgraceful. When challenged about this he would reply: how happy would we be if we were able to suppress hunger simply by rubbing our belly.
So, assuming this isn't just a rumour spread by Diogenes himself....
Diogenes' barrel was in the middle of Corinth, where he could be seen & talked about. Where he could be vocally cynical of other people, etc. If Diogenes really wanted to be left alone, fill his belly and nap... he could have done this easily.
Many Greek well-to-dos in his place did just retired to a quiet country life where no one bothers you. He didn't, wanting to be seen not giving a fuck.
I wonder if like modern counter cultural figures, his fan base tended to be late teens?
Well if he had zero money he couldn't retire to a quiet country life... That's why homeless people today do not choose to live in nice places in the countryside but instead sleep on the pavement in cities. It's much less pleasant but you starve less in the city.
Also, maybe he wanted to tell other people they were fools, not just "wanting to be seen not giving a fuck".
Sure, if you want to lecture people about themselves then you give a fuck about at least that, but it's different than simply trying to be the center of attention.
I really think Diogenes was a philosopher (Diogenes the character -- this is true whether he actually existed or not): he had a point of view that he wanted to share.
Diogenes (the character) was a famous, upper class dude. Lifelong poverty wasn't a trap he couldn't escape.
Also I didn't mean to be too harsh. The "can't wait to tell you how little I care" trope is one we can't escape even in modern dissident youth culture. Hippies, punk, goth, emo... every generation reinvents it and it's artistically/culturally rich ground.
That said, the Diogenes character definitely does seem like he enjoyed being the centre of attention. It's like Marilyn Manson going on daytime talk shows in the 90s to tell normies that he doesn't care what they think. There's obviously a falsity in there, somewhere. It got my attention though, as a teen, and I still listen to th albums.
The point of the barrel is to be seen in a barrel, at the very least to demonstrate the philosophical reasoning for the barrel.
There are plenty of people who genuinely don't care what the people of Corinth think, say or do. The don't choose to spend their time in the public square debating.
This "care what you think" phrasing I think is really deceptive. Because the active issue is whether you conform to group norms or refuse to do so.
If someone refuses to conform to a group, then demonstrably they don't care enough about the benefits of group inclusion to comply with the group demands.
If someone quits their job, they may in _some_ sense "care what the boss thinks," but there is a much more important sense in which they don't (while those who do not quit, do).
I guess people may be "loud" about their refusal, in various ways, because they don't want a refusal to conform to be mistaken for an inability to perform. Much like the person who is quitting does not want to be perceived as having been fired. Again, that is a very different kind of concern than the person who is trying to keep their job.
There can be cultural moments, relationship moments, etc. where the exact same thing may register as a lame "can't wait to tell you how little I care" or a much needed bit of stridency... a la chuck berry, john lennon or courtney love.
Edge Lord is the pejorative to something with a very flattering synonym, though we might argue what that synonym is.
> He famously told Alexander the Great to fuck off and stop blocking the light (which leads me to think that the ultimate "fuck you money" is to have no money at all, and not want any).
Many historians think this anecdote is apocryphal, giving credence to the opinion that Diogenes' act was... an act.
A lot of this is probably apocryphal. He was such an outrageous character that people seem to have used him as a trope when telling jokes, he was a living fictional character and seems to have enjoyed fanning on the stories about him. This is sort of central to the accusation too, he seems to have really reveled in his infamy and no doubt encouraged these stories.
Like the exchange with Alexander, which is questionable if it ever happened or whether it's just an anecdote that went "viral". A tale of how the world's most powerful general hashing words with the world's most impudent homeless man, it's both entertaining and inspires the imagination. A bit like a superman vs batman fight.
It may be possible, that the pirates who captured Diogenes were not the same as those who captured Servantes. You may have to differentiate your approach and adjust it to the specific type of pirates, if captured by pirates...
OP here, thanks a lot for sharing this enlightening story. Your last paragraph remind me also of the Viktor Frankl's "Man Search For Meaning" where the change in outlook was a difference between persevering and perishing in the camps.
> Your last paragraph remind me also of the Viktor Frankl's "Man Search For Meaning" where the change in outlook was a difference between persevering and perishing in the camps.
Which is complete and utter nonsense. Sure, it makes for nice advertising for Frankl's Logotherapy shtick but it's not an accurate picture of what happened in the camps.
The fundamental point of people giving up vs resisting is the core thesis of Frankl and has rung true to every facet of life. Even if we are to assume his story is embellished, I have seen it played out time and time again.
Been a while since I read it, but iirc one of his examples is of fellow captives telling themselves they'll be free before the new year, then the new year comes, still not free, and those would be the first ones to go (your "giving up").
But the alternative I never took as "resisting" - but "purpose." Frankl's own purpose being the study of people under such extreme conditions, but his point (again, iirc) being that having that indefinite, daily, purpose is what keeps people alive and brings meaning.
Now, granted, it's been a while since I read it, but can you provide some color to this notion of "resisting" ? It'd be interesting if you took something completely different away from it (or if I remember it incorrectly and should be corrected.)
Frankl suggests that the people who perished in Nazi concentration camps could have survived if they had a better attitude. This is intellectually dishonest and morally repugnant. It is akin to suggesting that people who suffer from depression should just try not being sad, only much much worse.
I will hazard a guess and say that nothing you have seen played out time and time again compares to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Why are you absolutely misintepreting his argument? It is completely obvious that he's saying that keeping hopes up helps, and helps a lot a lot. He's not trying to defy the laws of physics by which malnourished people can survive what is impossible.
I suppose you were there with Frankl and can tell us all about it and how you managed to survive. Did you ask to have your ladle of soup scooped "from the bottom" or did you have a superior strategy for survival?
Your comment is a vacuous, bald assertion that Frankl is "nonesense" and his ideas were a "schtick". Next time you comment, consider shedding light on the matter rather than merely smearing and adumbrating.
I believe the GP is largely spot on. Evidence is not easy for me to link to now—when I looked into this a few years ago, I looked up a few of the books linked to in the substantial Controversy section of Frankl's wikipedia page. That section was erased by Frankl's grandson a couple of years ago–yes, hard to believe. Before that, it said something like - Frankl only spent a week at Auschwitz, not the many months the book gives you the impression of. Before then, Frankl also himself did medical experiments on Jews (yes really, pretty horrific ones) and tried to get the Nazis interested in them. I read in detail about these claims in chapters of the books that used to be linked to, and in a couple of sources those books mentioned in turn. They seemed true, as far as I could tell. Maybe you can find them from the page history.[0] Also it mentioned that when Frankl tried to give a talk in New York in the 1970s he was shouted down by Jews calling him a Nazi. After learning more about him, that doesn't surprise me. It seems scandalous that Frankl's grandson has been able whitewash his story like this on wikipedia. I'm not a regular wikipedia editor, so I didn't know what to do about that besides register a protest on the talk page.
I also read and loved Frankl's book decades ago, and discovering something of the real story was highly disturbing. Also it seems that in actuality, positive mental attitude didn't keep you alive in the camps, although it sounds nice that it would. Survival was much more random. I believe people whose relatives died in the camps were/are highly offended by his suggestion that if only they'd had a better attitude they would've survived. It seems like victim blaming. The page also linked to a discussion of that, from memory. Sorry I don't have anything more concrete than that. It would be nice to restore links to those books, essays, etc to at least the talk page of Frankl's wikipedia page! Although it seemed like just Frankl's grandson deleting anything negative. (I haven't looked at Frankl's page for a year or 2, maybe it's changed)
[0] Finding out when Frankl's grandson (who has commented on the talk page I think) did his first edits, and looking just before that, might be a good way to find the old Controversy section.
Thanks for the response, as I was unaware of this. Unlike the GP, you've provided reasons for the criticism which is what I'd rather see than bald assertions of "person bad".
The assertion that Frankl is "nonesense" and his ideas were a "schtick". That was the sole content of the comment. If there's a reason to be critical, I want to know why, not be treated to name-calling.
It was in response to a comment that stated the gist of Frankl's argument i.e. the change in outlook was a difference between persevering and perishing in the camps. The context is right there in the quotation.
To me, the idea that people died in concentration camps because they had bad attitudes is as nonsensical as suggesting gravity is a social construct. You might feel my dismissal needs more explanation. I respectfully disagree and this is a hill I'm willing to die on.
I didn't know this story so I looked it up [0]. According to Plutarch, it's true: Caesar was captured by pirates in his twenties, and was insulted by their lowball ransom of 20 talents--he thought he was worth at least 50. He told the pirates they should up the ransom and that once it was delivered and he was freed, he'd have them all crucified. They thought it was a pretty good joke. He wasn't joking. Once free, he raised an army and a fleet and went back to the pirate's camp, capturing them and having them thrown in prison. Apparently he showed them mercy by having their throats cut before they were crucified, however.
It's actually an extreme case of privilege. The pirates were probably some very poor commoners who turned to a life of crime, while he was a member of one of the most powerful political families in Ancient Rome.
His upbringing was nothing like that of what were probably children the dirt poor farmers.
He was lucky that no one snapped (I imagine some did but the thought of such a huge amount of money meant that everyone was kept in line) and the rest is just a bold and vengeful ultra rich, ultra privileged person getting their revenge.
It is very bold, but my point is that commoners were naturally very afraid of nobles. On top of that, in this particular case they knew the financial value of capturing a noble, let alone the fact that this particular noble promised them even more money.
As another commoner you'd probably get gutted like a fish if you'd try the same thing.
It's true but being noble was its own thing with its own particular risks and costs. If you were to choose undeserving nobles across history IMHO J C would be among the worst sells.
And another from The Magus by John Fowles: "...cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all."
> In a world fit for cynics, you have to be ready for things to go right if you want to escape.
That is open to challenge - it might be that cynics have an advantage because they are better at biding their time until an opportunity arises. And are less likely to be demoralised because they are used to dealing with the general difficulty of it all.
It isn't like Cervantes had a fundamentally optimistic viewpoint. Don Quixote, as a great book, appeals to the views of cynics just as much as anyone else.
That quote reminds me of the song _Bright Horses_, by Nick Cave (who lost his son to a tragic accident some years before).
"We're all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are / Horses are just horses and their manes aren't full of fire / The fields are just fields, and there ain't no Lord"
and later
"Oh, oh, oh, well, this world is plain to see / It don't mean we can't believe in something, and anyway / My baby's coming back now on the next train / I can hear the whistle blowing, I can hear the mighty roar / I can hear the horses prancing in the pastures of the Lord"
>Another good quote for the OP is Miguel De Cervantes, author if Don Quixote: "there is madness in too much sanity, and the greatest madness of all is to see things as they are instead of as they should be".
I admire heroes but I don't want to be one. I rather live a happy life than be another sad story who inspires people.
I'm pretty sure I fall into the definition of a cynic given in the piece
"according to cynics, the world operates in a certain way, the elites are always the same, and will always be the same. The cynics think we are always playing the same game that has always been played. For example, a cynic may think that media’s only purpose is to sells your attention to advertisers - like I did here. And often they might be right."
but I too be honest don't really see the problem with that kind of worldview. I'm not chronically depressed or antagonistic because of it, but I think I'd rather have what I'd consider a realistic and true view of the world as it is rather than anything else.
"One of the strongest medicines against cynical mindset which I’ve tried is to do a “no-complain challenge”. I find its effects to be enormous and durable for years. In this challenge, you move a bracelet from one wrist to the other when you catch yourself complaining. The goal is to make it 21 days without having move the wrist. "
Before you start prescribing medicine we need to agree that cynicism is an illness first, which is not so easily done. I think the author conflates people who are sort of angry or pessimistic because of their lot in life with his definition of a cynic. I take the cynical view because of what I perceive are fundamental aspects of human nature collectively, not my mood personally. I can beat that challenge without a problem because I rarely complain, or win the lottery tomorrow and it wouldn't really have an impact of my views on the way the world operates overall.
I think there's a general failure of communication here, and throughout the current social discourse on "cynicism".
There's a sort of false trichotomy at play in this post, and on Twitter I've noticed a dichotomous version: "Should we be happy that we're improving, or sad that there's so far to go?" (That's my summary of it, anyway)
Why not both? We should appreciate how far things have come (it is truely astounding), but of course that doesn't imply that we should be content with where we are. We should be deeply discontent - at least to the extent that it motivates us to fight towards a better future. A magnitude or type of discontent that leads to depression/apathy is obviously not helpful.
It seems like a significant portion of tribal "controversy" on social media is stoked by mouthpieces on either side that are almost purposefully playing into the dichotomy perspective, because adding subtlety into the discussion would throw water on the flames, and that's just ending the "fun".
I think this comment is a good example of a type of cynicism that we're discussing, probably the type that most instinctively jumps out as "cynical."
Like pessimism and optimism, cynicism often boils down to a bias.
The key word is "just" (virtue signalling). Blogging, commenting, and communicating generally are various things as once. We're pursuing intellectual curiosity, showing off, participating in a culture, signalling virtue, signalling other things... to ourselves and to others.
Our bias and/or perspective lens dictates our focus. A lot of cynicism, certainly within my generational cohort, is also about signalling. Signaling that we're not naive, that we're cool, grunge, etc. If you hate grunge, hippies, Diogenes or whatnot, you're more likely to adopt a perspective whereby they're "just" bunch of virtue signaling posers.
You can always plausibly adopt this perspective. Grunge, hippies, Diogenes & whatnot are attention seekers. They are cultural figures, which is kind of virtue signalling by definition. They're also other things though. Reducing these to "just" virtue signalling is cynicism regarding these things.
You can also have a general cynical viewpoint, but it's pretty hard to do without also adopting arseholery. As a general cynic, you pretty much assume that base motivation for everything. OP is just virtue-signalling optimism. Drewcoo is just edgelord cool-signalling. Netcan is just cool-signaling.
I think what is true from reading reddit, HN & the internet broadly is that cynicism is very "in" right now, to the point where it's annoying. Hence, I suppose, why such posts do well.
It's signaling something, but not virtue: criticism implies expertise. People observe the respect experts get and start imitating the behavior. Since they don't have anything actually insightful to add, they fall back on generic opposition to everything, also called cynicism.
It's cargo-culting for non-(non-?)academia. HN, the world's #1 source of smartitude, may just be its purest crystallization.
"Should we be happy that we're improving, or sad that there's so far to go?"
A hardcore cynic might say, there is no improvement, only change. We might have come so far with some things, but lost or destroyed so many others in exchange.
I'm not chronically depressed or antagonistic because of it, but I think I'd rather have what I'd consider a realistic and true view of the world as it is rather than anything else.
I knew some cynical folks and you do not seem to be one of them. The criteria is not how objectively you view the world, but how you act on it. E.g. someone “redirects” the train of medicine for troops in a conflict, because anybody would do that if it wasn’t them (and spent this money on things much worse than they planned). Someone figuratively spits onto a guy operating a gate, because he didn’t choose to have a good time in his life anyway.
And they are right – that train would never make it to its destination, and a gate operator made a mistake in their career. But once you accept that as how the world works naturally, it’s easy to just go and take it, cause you’re not that bad, bad is the world. That is cynical. Simply seeing things as they are is not.
One of the strongest medicines against cynical mindset which I’ve tried is to do a “no-complain challenge” (from tfa)
I don’t know, maybe it works for them, but if I would no-complain everyday, I believe I’d become cynical AF. Our local prisoners have the rule: do not seek the truth, i.e. do not complain about anything, it is what it is. Everyone experiences it and your problem is irrelevant. This teaches them to live on their own, ignore any unfairness, and get whatever they can whenever they can. Long-term convicts basically live by these rules.
Of course there are levels of cynicism, and maybe it’s all about moderate levels of it, not extreme ones.
Interesting post. I think cynicism is both about how you view the world and how you act in it, because the former informs the latter. So to me cynicism is both a view of the world broadly, I think of it sort of as Hobbesian, empirical and realistic rather than idealistic and certain ways to act individually. A sort of Machiavellian personality type is to me a pragmatic form of cynicism.
To take the prison example. I guess a cynical person would say, yes, complaining makes no sense because if you loudly complain the guards just beat you up. Staging a prison revolt is just going to give you more years and the justice system is screwed as well. The prison is a zero sum environment and you're likely only going to get ahead by screwing over someone else, and being deceptive and clever.
And honestly to me that's a fairly accurate description of actual prisons in most places. Cynics tend to be people who are acutely aware of power and how people leverage it for their own interests, but I don't think it implies that one has to resign from life.
Thanks for the personal take, a lot of people would couch that perspective in abstract terms or attack the piece.
I see cynicism as coming from alienation, lack of alignment, "alone in a crowd" type of thing.
I start thinking cynically when I have a problem that I don't trust other people with, and feel like I can't solve on my own.
IMO cynicism is not a problem on an individual level.
It’s when the group has a lot of cynics is when we have a problem. Have you ever had to work with a group of “low energy” people? They’re not only just low energy — they’re energy vampires.
The converse is true, too. It’s absolutely sapping working with folks who’ll just repeat bullshit and call you a cynic for trying to helpfully point out the flaws in their thinking.
There is a very real difference between constructive criticism and simply complaining. In most cases, complaining and shutting people down without suggesting any possible alternative or improvement just makes the situation even less unpleasant for everyone.
Sometimes complaining means acknowledging that a problem exists even if you don't know the solution. Pointing out problems is valuable too. On the other and the people[1] who "opt out of cynicism" generally want to live in the "best of the possible world" where problems just disappear if don't look at them.
[1] that I've met and interacted with, of course there's a sampling bias.
Wouldn’t it also be applicable to a lot of intrinsically problematic situations ?
For instance if you had to direct an “employees right” course in a strongly anti-union company, you’d have “low energy” people looking at you with dead eyes, and you’d be complaining they suck your energy too. But is it really a problem outside of the scope of your course ?
> I think I'd rather have what I'd consider a realistic and true view of the world as it is rather than anything else.
You say that but a realistic and true view of the world will show that things have indeed changed for the better for a lot of marginalized people -- and within our lifetimes, too. It's definitely not "always the same", to paraphrase the author. If you think it is, you may be the kind of person the author is referring to.
I agree with you completely. I think that I am also a cynic based on this article but certainly an optimistic cynic. I believe fully that things can but we will have to work together(which is admittedly a very difficult thing to do) and also be very smart about the changes we make. I would argue that choosing to ignore the reality of things and to not be cynical would ultimately make change harder to achieve. Working smarter not harder, after all.
Definitely. I see myself as a cynic, but I also don't find cynicism compulsive like the author suggests. If someone asks me to stop being cynical, or a situation calls for less reductive voices in the room, I have no problem shutting up and simply listening to people. Mentally, I can still digest the conversation around me and operate normally, but acting like it's some kind of disorder is a silly exaggeration, plain and simple.
If you continuously call all politicians equally corrupt, they have no incentive not to be. You and the people you influence will have no justification based in reality for the decisions you get to make, like voting. That’s the end of democracy.
Cynicism is a form of having outcome independence. I can only change what is in my control. The forces of zealots, the paranoid, the corrupt, sociopaths, and benevolent dictators will keep swarming around in a cacophony until long after I'm dead. I choose to let it ruin my day on a regular basis, or I can find inner happiness.
LOLz well done, selling happy faces to the most cynical crowd on the internet :D Look at these comments! My oh-my.
Seriously though, good piece - if a bit shallow. It's a good start. People need to hear this.
Cynicism is the only evil in the world. The opposite, of course, is innocence - and, since this can't exist in pure form, the closest second is gullibility. Not ONE person here will agree that gullibility is a good thing, but I say it's our saviour. It is truly the best you can do in life.
Look, it's not that cynics are wrong... No. They are right. That's the problem. The problem is that they are right. And that's the root of all evil. They are limited - enslaved - by their reality. There's no escaping it. So the only thing they feel they can do is fight back, with all their might... And you know where this leads? Straight to hell.
I'll make it more painful.
The ones who fight corruption are the most corrupt.
The ones who fight injustice are the most cruel.
The ones who fight intolerance are least tolerant.
Your only moral obligation in life is to make this decision for yourself: Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be good?
If it's more important to be right - you're already on the loosing team. If it's more important to be good - now you are ACTUALLY right.
I don't think it's this black and white. 'Candide' makes a good argument against the other side of the coin, toxic optimism or whatever you want to call it. Horrible things absolutely do happen and ignoring this doesn't make things better.
Maybe the problem is an inappropriate amount of faith. Not in the religious sense of the word, but as in confidence in external things. The optimists have far too much, the cynics have far too little. Maybe we should look to the mean.
Having no faith at all offers up a breeding ground for corruption on both personal and institutional level. Having too much obscures it if it's already there.
> Your only moral obligation in life is to make this decision for yourself: Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be good?
Often the question that should be asked is "why aren't you doing the things you know you should do?" Most people already know what is good, yet they do other things instead out of sheer momentum of habit, or because they don't realize they had an option.
>Often the question that should be asked is "why aren't you doing the things you know you should do?"
Why is there a "should"? Is there a unique and universal way to determine what someone should do? Given the same situation two different people can act in two different ways. Is there a rule implying that one is right and the other is wrong?
Nothing of the sort is implied. Everyone can have their own should (or not, as the case may be). But if you know you should do something, presumably you're past such useless philosophising. I know I should be nicer to the people I love, and
> Why is there a "should"? Is there a unique and universal way to determine what someone should do? Given the same situation two different people can act in two different ways. Is there a rule implying that one is right and the other is wrong?
In case someone reading this thread has never encountered this stance, I sincerely hold the belief that there are objective moral truths that we can discover with our senses and intuition.
Your question is big. The answer I've landed on is little. We're just little furry wiggly wombly tubes struggling against the inevitable pressures of entropy. This is true down to the most basic molecule than can replicate.
Objective moral truths stem from that. The unending dance with entropy. To be the belle of the ball, we also harness that entropic randomness and turn it into dances that are even more powerful.
I feel the urge to thrive and grow and improve. I find myself sympathetic to the expressions of that drive from all life. That is a priori, that emergent empathy that many of us are capable of. I see a neighbor crying, a homeless man sleeping rough, a fearful stranger, and I say to myself, "There but for the grace of God, go I." But I don't stop there, because I see my puppy, I see a bird in the sky, I see a crushed mollusk, a writhing worm, "There but for the grace of God, go I." We're many faces, but still, we're all dancing with the entropy.
Next is the question, "Will this action increase or decrease the entropy in the universe? To the many faces, is this the action of an ally or an enemy?"
Finally, we realize we could superheat everything into crystals and reduce entropy that way. The last vital factor is the synthesis of order and disorder: complexity. These are the fun dances. Art. Learning. Creation.
So, to find objective moral truths, our sieve consists of The Golden Rule, "Am I fucking things up more?" and "Am I making things more awesome?"
Right, but I just don't understand how you can generalize your subjective experiences to objective truth, especially in the face of people disagreeing. If a truth requires some particular perspective our outlook to become apparent, then it just isn't objective.
The assumption is that empathy is a priori. That's a phenomological sense, an alternative to "I think therefore I am." One step below that is "I feel, therefore I am," which applies to all sentient beings with the capacity for feelings.
Right, but some might consider the other end of the spectrum as also bad.
Extremely stable societies are often marked by low social mobility and oppressive social mores, yet they fulfill every check mark according to your definition of good. It would also deem the emancipation of slaves an evil deed, since it disrupts a stable pattern of social order that's extended for a long stretch of time.
I don't know if I would deem something like ancient egypt, which had a social order that persisted largely unchanged for several thousand years, one of the most stable societies known in history (also an oppressive theocracy), I don't know if that is my idea of good.
Either too much chaos or too much order are indeed failure conditions that appear in our history/stories/myths. So I'd not go to either extreme of that spectrum.
Merely persisting is not sufficient for something to be moral, but it is a necessary requirement. We need principles on how to behave in repeated interactions and situations over long periods, or bad things will eventually happen. That's part of the purpose of moral truths you were raising a question about.
I'd just point out that ancient Egypt had developed moral-sensemaking technology that were state of the art at the time. It's the best we as humans could do to live in a large ecosystem and we're standing on their shoulders. It's not surprising that we would find fault.
The pure game theory idea doesn't work because it won't be internally consistent -- we understand morality isn't supposed to vary from person to person depending on how powerful their social position is.
When you say we "understand" what it's supposed to be, what do you mean? That morality is an attempt to generalize required behaviour over different situations was the point. The utility of the morality project is that has the goal of preventing any situation from going to hell. That's what makes the game compelling to participants. From a selfish game theory perspective, the repeated interactions is the argument for it.
Our common understanding of the concept of morality is something that is universal. We don't accept that there should be a different morality for the king vs. the peasant.
> The ones who fight corruption are the most corrupt.
> The ones who fight injustice are the most cruel.
> The ones who fight intolerance are least tolerant.
I have not found this to be the case; and this phrasing is needlessly reductive. See also the paradox of tolerance. And “tolerance” as a bar is pretty damn low; it’s not something you should be patting yourself on the back for. It’s just showing humanity to those around you.
Part of the problem is that we live in a world where “lie, cheat, steal” legitimately does make your material conditions better most of the time. So we’re all typically equal parts “good” and “bad”, and we even have different definitions (e.g. an evangelical Christian may legitimately feel like they’re doing good by shaming gay people).
Cynicism is a recognition that not everyone shares your values, and some in fact have values that directly conflict with yours. It’s often useful, and I disagree with the original article.
This is basically Aristotle 101. If you like this sentiment, grandpa A should be on your reading list. Not that he’s objectively correct, but Nichomachean Ethics is the foundation on top of which the European ideas of “good” and “evil” are built.
> Your only moral obligation in life is to make this decision for yourself: Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be good?
"That's just, like, your opinion, man"
In all seriousness, though, no one has your moral obligations. They're yours and yours alone by definition (unless you believe in gods, fairy tales and whatnot).
That's not my impression, my impression is that it's laziness channeled into virtue signaling to show all the other lazy people out there that if they are fed up with having to struggle for results then instead they can redefine the struggle as evil and their ideal circumstance of doing nothing and being praised for it may become a reality.
Of course this mindset can only ever attract other lazy people and even then only from a distance. Even lazy people desire relationships with people putting in the effort.
That's the OP's original point: people who spend their entire lives "fighting corruption" get blinded by their righteousness and zealotry and in effect become corrupt themselves.
How? Becoming corrupt is not the same as getting blinded by zealotry (you can be an honest, true believing, incorruptible zealot). Seems like lazy wordplay to me... or something out of Star Wars, like falling to the Dark Side.
Let me give you a concrete perspective on living in post-communist Bulgaria, which is a rather cynical, nihilistic and fatalistic society, at least by Western standards. There is no meaningful political debate about future policies, what we have instead is name-calling between politicians using a pre-defined set of labels ("anti-communist", "communoid", "Soros-funded foreign agent with a neoliberal agenda", "rusophobe", "rusophile"). It's an inherently fruitless construct which fortifies itself as time passes. The wider population believes in "conventional wisdom" and also recognises these labels. For the anti-communist camp, all of the evil in this country was conceived by a few state security officers during the early 1990s, who were directing a puppet show in front of the population. For the pejoratively called "communoid" camp, all of the evil was caused by the new "democrats" who sold profitable state enterprises for pennies to questionable individuals.
It's a self-inflicted reality which persists much longer than is needed. The state security officers are now mostly dead or in their late 70s, those state enterprises are bankrupt from long ago, yet somehow it is still a relevant identification issue when it comes to your political beliefs.
Good is an optimizing function for groups of cooperating people. Once the groups get so big they are taken over by psychopathic elites (this is mostly inevitable) is when the concept of good is ultimately detrimental. Sacrificing for your fellow man is only desirable when that man does not deliberately position himself to consistently profit from such sacrifices.
Are we sure about this one? Do we have evidence that safe spaces in college universities are worse than South Africa’s apartheid regime or the systemic genocide of natives in Canada/America? Do we have evidence that the southern poverty law center is performing hate crimes worse than the kkk?
ITT: Instead of being an overt narcissist, be a covert narcissist! :)
An apparently popular and easy way not to complain about problems is to simply stop yourself from perceiving them. The bigger the problems get, and the more you are confronted with them, while you forbid yourself from recognising that any conflict exists, the more it begins to look like the problem is your own lack of faith or "positivity". So the worse things get, the more you double down on your faith by putting increasing amounts of energy in to maintaining a delusional belief system designed to deal with problems or conflicts by explaining them away as an internal problem with yourself or your own emotional tate.
Does this sound like a recipe for improving your situation? Or anyone's situation?
To me, it sounds much more like a reliable method for the cultivation of increasingly bizarre thoughts and erratic behaviour.
What if you, instead, did the bracelet trick for every time you avoided a confrontation with the world that you know is necessary? What if you just console yourself with the fact the the world has problems and the vast majority of them cannot be solved by you (since you are not the omnipotent force)? You do realise that you don't have to stop caring about the problems, right? You know that it's just not worth investing energy in to worrying about things that are completely out of your control, right? That isn't cynicism, it's the picture postcard of mental health.
The reason is, you have pre-decided an emotional polarity and you're consciously expending effort to compulsively fit the reality to the emotional polarity that you desire. That is the opposite way round to what you need if you desire both accurate perception AND healthy emotional regulation.
I think that's a common misconception I hear a lot. You are completely right about the way you are looking at it, but imho it's the other way around: noticing confrontation instead of avoiding it. It's not about thinking "this is fine' about everything. It's way more mental work do think about reasons why some things are the way they are, rather than just labeling at as bad or broken and therefore dismissing it. Finding the purpose of the current problematic situation is step 1, then you can go ahead and tackle it with another solution that achieves the goal differently (and hopefully in a better way for most people, but that's only my personal belief).
a family member went through a traumatic substance abuse incident a few years back and went to rehab. when he came back, what you're describing here was his new, apparently instilled mindset toward life. ignore unhappy things, enjoy happy things, begin to exhibit increasingly, worryingly, alienatingly bizarre/erratic behavior, arguably worse than the initial (legal) substance abuse. this mindset seems to be the new generalized prescription these days and I hate it.
But what do I mean by being cynical? When you’re conversing with someone, it often easy to detect the frame through which they view the world and the interaction with you. Cynics think that the world is never changing on a fundamental level, but it only changes cosmetically, and superficially. Cynics may look at some new trend and call it “lipstick on a pig”. According to cynics, the world operates in a certain way, the elites are always the same, and will always be the same. The cynics think we are always playing the same game that has always been played. For example, a cynic may think that media’s only purpose is to sells your attention to advertisers - like I did here. And often they might be right.
What is wrong with that. I would rather be a cynic and have the correct framing of the world than be too optimistic and deluded. Success at investing for example requires looking at things objectively.
I agree. It's critical to have a crystal-clear view of the world than wrap yourself with sweet dream. Failing to do so will easily make the one look away from root problems deep in the ground, and concentrate on the surface issues. Cynics, on the other hand, hates the world, thus have no problem with overturning the entire stack built on top of the anyway-broken foundation.
Also, it's wrong to assume that cynicism leads to negative and passive attitudes. Cynics often bring bigger improvements faster than what people with positive attitude ever can, because, guess what, things suck. Being a cynic only means the one is negative about the current state and direction, and one can still be positive about the ideal state that the one believes in. Once that ideal is set, cynics can be the most fierce fighter for their own ideals.
Yet, for cynics to make progresses, it's important to get out of their own sweet spot and start moving. Ones who only love talking deserves all the criticism.
It's also so much more complicated than this. I've known more than one person who didn't act as a cynic, they outwardly preached and proselytized this sort of "change the world" viewpoint, in order to attract attention and twitter followers. In a professional context they wanted to play the part of a "visionary" or whatever, and always acted positive about change. Yet, if you really get to know them and manage to ask the right question in a vulnerable moment, you would suddenly realize that their internal worldview is just about as cynical as it's possible to be.
It has been my experience that the skill to be outwardly "visionary" and at the same time remain cynic at heart gets rewarded most handsomely, especially in corporate world. We all have been in those meetings, town halls and off-sites where all the right, inspiring words are routinely uttered and amazing examples of leadership are described. Yet, once you exit the meeting room and actually work with and get to know those leaders - you quickly realize that it is cold, hard, calculating cynicism (and thus true understanding of reality) is what that drives their (sometimes "behind the scenes") actions and results in conquering the corporate ladder. My personal level of respective incompetence has been reached when I found myself unable to spew that BS with conviction from a podium.
I wonder if folks say the same about me. It's possible to see the imperfections in the world, and yet be positive about how we operate in a world that's full of them. And no, they will never go away. Until sentience disappears, dissatisfaction will remain. But it doesn't have to mean anger, negativity, or cynicism.
> a cynic may think that media’s only purpose is to sells your attention to advertisers
Thinking this makes me a cynic? I don't think so. This is a fact that gets proven right every day on the internet. If anything I'm a hopelessly deluded optimist who thinks the web can actually go back to its pure beginnings when people said what they wanted without worrying that some advertiser will pull their funding.
Yes, it is cynical to see only this side of the coin.
What about passionate creators who use advertising as a means to finance their vocation? What about the wide informational and educational value of media?
> It's great but also a relatively tiny minority of all content. A niche really. And even those tend have ads.
I disagree.
And even if it was true, why do you care? I mean, I watch almost only this kind of videos on YouTube - documentaries, education (learning German ATM), infotainment and there's a huge amount of it. Niche or not, there is still more than enough quality content to watch 24h/day.
Word of mouth. When some new business opens, people notice and tell their friends. Also, sometimes people will ask to be advertised to. When I enter a store, I'm looking to buy stuff so go ahead and show me the stuff. I don't actually think of these as advertising at all. One is friends telling me about cool stuff while the other is the business doing what I explicitly asked of them.
The problems start when people start trying to sell my attention to the highest bidder. That's unacceptable. My attention is not theirs to sell. Not once did I consent to having information forcibly injected into my mind. I will resist it to the bitter end no matter the consequences.
That was the model for traditional media, as well.
Newspaper prices only covered a fraction of their costs, their most valuable products were the pages. Each page would have a different cost for ads (first page - super high price, second page - quite high, last page - also high, etc.).
Deluded self-assurance most reliably delivers success. Cynics and realists tend to not understand this and thus don't take enough risks when they should, and are confined to mediocre results (compared to their peers in similar situations).
> Deluded self-assurance most reliably delivers success.
I don't believe so. However I do believe that projecting a deluded self-assuring aura helps convince people to follow you, but that doesn't mean that your internals acts that way. It is really hard to know what people really think underneath that facade, I am pretty sure much more is going on that people want to show.
There are people that have remarkably positive outlooks on life and that allows them to do the daily grind that's necessary to achieve any semblance of change. A lot of people, seeing that you can actually progress in life, are moved by such personalities and find them inspiring.
That doesn't mean a person isn't sad, or can't get depressed, or not get seriously set back in life. It just means that pushing on and hoping for change can actually get you somewhere.
Everyone always deludes oneself. Even cynics and realists end up having their own versions of the reality. Also, risk, success, and financial success are completely irrelevant to each other, thus cynical attitude really has nothing to do with it.
Cassandra was always right, and always powerless to change anything. If you are speculating (not investing) and nothing more, then sure, you only want to see what is.
If you're creating, executing, advising, or actually investing, anchoring on what "is" risks losing to competition that suffers no such limitations.
If you believe you have no power to change things, then it's a self fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you can change things, you might be wrong. Which game you prefer to play is up to you.
No body blankly believes nothing can be changed, or believes everything can be changed. The two extremes are both obviously wrong. It's just important to understand what you can change and what you can't. So the starting point is about understanding how the world works, not just daydreaming.
If you're understanding is based on what's been observed before, you will never progress beyond it.
During the Enlightenment, all this science stuff looked extremely stupid. If people didn't persevere through the cynicism, we wouldn't have advanced the way we did.
Hmm. It seems quite obvious that, to the common person in that time period, science would have seemed like an irrelevant waste of time. Some cursory googling doesn't reveal much either way.
I'm not super confident in my speculation, it just seems the most likely to me. What makes you so confident?
Isn’t it cynicism (or idealism) just a survival strategy which happens because of your experiences? I know I tend to be more cynical than most of my peers but I always attributed that to growing up in poverty unlike them. Sometimes it seems a lot of people think others can apply their way of thinking or seeing the world and it will make their life instantly better. But I don’t think it can happen if they don’t live in the right context.
That is a really sad outlook to me. After decades in Enterprise IT, many in the public sector of Scandinavia you’d probably expect me to be a cynic, and if you go through my post history you’ll see very recent examples of what looks like it, but I’m actually always rather optimistic.
The healthy survival strategy in a world of shit isn’t to give up, it’s to fight on and hope for the best. It’s to come to the conclusion, that even though the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the fact that there are good intentions mean that the people actually wanted to succeed.
So while I’m very pessimistic, I’m also experienced enough to know that everyone is working for a better world.
In all my decades of working close to the political leadership and the top level decision makers, I can’t remember once meeting someone who wasn’t working for what they believed to be a better tomorrow. Maybe that’s a uniquely Danish trait, but I doubt it. What that good is, isn’t always what you or I would consider good, but my point is that even very evil decision makers are working for what they think is right.
The moment you become a cynic is the moment you lose your connection and with it, your ability to impact things. Because a manager who has the wrong view of your corporate culture, isn’t going to change unless you inspire them to be better and that applies to everyone.
Of course it’s hard to be optimistic as well. 98% or something like it of public IT system implementations fail to some extend, and if you expect them to succeed then I imagine it’ll be quite soul crushing. The key, to me at least, is to not let your pessimism turn into cynicism, because you don’t want to be the constant no-sayer either, you want to make your points and reservations clear, but then roll with the decision that gets made.
>The healthy survival strategy in a world of shit isn’t to give up, it’s to fight on and hope for the best.
The best survival strategy is to fight to improve your situation, not fight to change the world.
>The moment you become a cynic is the moment you lose your connection and with it, your ability to impact things. Because a manager who has the wrong view of your corporate culture, isn’t going to change unless you inspire them to be better and that applies to everyone.
Being realist or cynical would help you recognize the situation as it truly stands without looking at it through tainted glasses. It gives you more power, not less. Also, as a cynic, your goal won't be to inspire the manager to change, because that won't be a fight you are going to win. Your goal as a cynic would be to put yourself in a better position in that company.
As a cynic, I didn't try to fight the way things are laid in the company. The moment I found a position which seemed reasonably better at another company, I gave my resignation.
> The best survival strategy is to fight to improve your situation, not fight to change the world.
Individually, this is probably so. Collectively, it leads to the world becoming more and more shitty, year after year. It's a trap, and no one has figured out a way out.
> Being realist or cynical would help you recognize the situation as it truly stands without looking at it through tainted glasses.
I couldn’t disagree more. To me that is the lie that cynics fool themselves into believing is true.
I have no issue with the Socratic methodology, but the point of it is not to break the systems apart for the sake of finding flaws. It is to break them apart so that they can be reassembled better.
It’s that last part the modern cult of cynics forget too often in my experience. You’re not useful if all you can do is predict the doom and then say “I told you so” when you are proven right. Predicting where things will go wrong is easy, optimists do it as well, what sets them appear is that they try to move past their mistakes and learn for them.
To me no one is either an optimist or a cynic, labelling yourself as being only one is just too limiting, but in my anecdotal experience the people most likely to “make themselves” into just one category are the self-proclaimed realists.
Maybe my experience and opinions are wrong, but I have never come across such an individual who benefitted from their world view. At least no in the privileged world of Scandinavian software.
> In all my decades of working close to the political leadership and the top level decision makers, I can’t remember once meeting someone who wasn’t working for what they believed to be a better tomorrow.
The cynic in me thinks that people who tend to rub shoulders with The Powerful tend to (for the most part) see them as well-intentioned (although perhaps flawed) people rather than to be critical of them. Because it’s better for your own self to have friends in high places than to truly look at what they do with dispassionate eyes.
I don’t even need to get into how The Powerful are viewed by most people (who are more of at a distance) who don’t have such incentives.
I think it comes from the magic being dispelled. They are just ordinary people and they’re almost never well equipped to fill their functions in any meaningful way because of the complexity of the decisions they make.
There is a part of it about friendship, but it’s more because the world stops being black and white at those levels. Two politicians who come from the opposite sides will have more in common with each other than they will with any of the people who vote for them so it’s only natural that they remain faintly friendly with each other. They have to work together after all, as most things come down to compromises.
I think you attribute a causality where none necessarily exists. Some of "The Powerful" are indeed absolute bastards "always looking out for n.1", but a lot of them are sincere in their motives - it's just that they often happen to be ideologically misguided or forced into backfiring compromises by circumstances or greater powers.
Arguably, the most visible ones are often very sincere - because otherwise they couldn't sustain the drive necessary to reach certain heights.
A good friend of mine is a very senior civil servant in Ireland, and he says similar - most politicians are smart people sincerely trying to make the world a better place. I believe him. What's the alternative? Believing that all the world's problems would be fixed if only someone good-hearted would attempt to solve them?
Conversely, Ireland is also a major centre of global tax avoidance and civil servants are helping mega-corporations avoid European privacy legislation.
I might be wrong but it seems to me you're mixing cynicism and pessimism. With cynicism you distrust other intentions, but you can still fight to improve your situation or the situation of others.
The cynicism we see is a product more of the boredom of an upbringing in white suburban affluence. Some peoples’ lives in the past half-century were devoid of the struggles of other times and places. Lacking any contrast for anchoring, that homogeneity is interpreted as “everything is terrible” rather than “everything is fine”. Throw in a bit of aimless masculinity or status anxiety, and people start believing a bit of paintball-but-with-real-guns could fill that craving that’s been bothering them.
Others express their total disdain of even the concept of trust by jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon, or by believing TOR can do more for them than robust civil rights legislation. It’s all just aspects of the same sentiment, which is why there’s so much overlap.
I can see how cynicism is a valid strategy in certain contexts, but both you and author don't live in that situation anymore and a different strategy might be optimal in the respective contexts.
I guess the main thing here is to become aware through inspection of your current strategy and evaluate if it needs to be adjusted.
I will be the first to admit that I often think cynically about things.
I also think complaining about something is completely counter-intuitive to a cynical disposition.
Wikipedia might not be the best place to look for a definition, but doing so reveals that a cynic lives a life "in virtue, in agreement with nature."[1]
What the OP posted is much closer to a contemporary misunderstanding of the history of cynicism[2]. Cynically, I do not agree with this classification of cynicism, and although I may not change your mind I think we should stop conflating the process of attempting to see the harmonies[3] of our current ecosystem with the pessimism of a disillusioned generation[4] (of which I am one).
If what you do is counter to optimism, pessimism, and realism, while having a "fixed mindset" (as the article reads), imo you are not a cynic, you are just the stereotype of a millennial.
I don't think cynicism is just about stasis, but about spotting when optimistic messages are hiding a power-grabbing scheme of some kind. Or just being willing to 'follow the money', and look behind the curtain, etc.
Plenty of new things are important developments, even when there are selfish actors behind them. But also plenty of new things are just scams.
OP here, if you're able to separate the act of "look behind the curtain" from the visceral feeling that things can change and you can be the one improving them - then I'm very happy for you.
I personally found it hard to separate the two for many year, and fell in the pattern of unifying them. Cynical outlook has been a helpful protecting mechanism, though no longer as useful, as I'm trying to find and play more win-win games.
Yes maybe my definition is wrong, I consider myself slightly cynical (I lived to see the excitement of cyberspace turn into Facebook after all), but perhaps I mean skeptical, although to me what you're talking about is more nihilism.
There are some things that really don't change, and I guess that can be a source of cynicism. The poor will always be among you, lying politicians, the greedy rich, etc. But I'd argue that isn't cause for inaction, quite the opposite, though I can see nihilists just retreating to their beds in despair.
Interesting point about nihilism, appreciate your discussion. I still identify as cynical in many domains, though I don't think of myself as nihilistic as the latter seems more absolute.
Re: things that really don't change, I'd say "until they do". Plenty of examples in history where the whole system switches to a different equilibrium point (for example as in "Inadequate Equilibria" book).
When I'm referring to cynicism, I'm talking about the difference between the mindset of "these will never change", vs "these are attractor points in the current social system, which all history so far have been used, but the system may have other equilibriums and solutions for which X=`the rich are not greedy`".
The things that don't change I refer to, I really mean human nature, and I really think that doesn't change much. Some people just want to watch the world burn, etc, some people are greedy, narcissistic, lazy, psychotic, etc.
The cause for optimism, is that we can change society to better deal with the nature of the beast, bring out the best, and suppress the ugly. There's lots of work to do!
We live in a world on near limitless abundance. We already live in a potential post-scarcity world.
The only reason there are poor among us IS the greedy rich; but the greedy rich isn't some faceless, abstract, unkillable cosmic god. They have names and addresses; what they have can be taken from them as has happened many many times throughout history.
Things can change, sometimes slowly, sometimes incredibly quickly.
We have seen the impossible become inevitable over and over in the last few decades, and yet it still seems impossible for people to imagine the "impossible". I wonder if there is a name for that sort of fallacious thinking.
Yes, the rich can be stripped. But they'll be replaced by another elite. I think human nature will tend towards some kind of hierarchy.
The opportunity is to make the currency of that hierarchy something far above basic needs, IMHO. Perhaps this could be a genuine use-case for cryptocurrencies, so that the ultra wealthy can 'keep score' in maths, rather than mega-yachts, private jets, dark satanic mills, etc.
Is that really cynicism? If you are willing to look behind the curtain or follow the money, you must believe there's a chance that some optimistic messages are actually honest, right? Otherwise, why bother looking?
The viewpoint that says "why bother looking" is cynicism, I think. This is the viewpoint that says "all optimistic messages are power grabbing schemes." And it is a really disempowering and hopeless way of viewing the world.
I think it is better to keep looking behind the curtain. There's got to be something good back there.
I think „why bother looking“ is actually defeatism. Maybe they are closely related, but I feel cynicism has more of an „I told you so“ ring to it. In that interpretation, cynicism would be about jaded expectations re the future, while defeatism would be (accompanying?) demotivation. I wouldn’t ascribe demotivation to every cynicist though.
> about spotting when optimistic messages are hiding a power-grabbing scheme of some kind
IMO that's not being cynical. That's actually an universally positive trait: being able to spot power-grabbing schemes.
The problem with the negative side of cynicism described in the article is that, (to follow your example) the power-grabbing scheme is not the thing being detected, but rather the display of optimism. Every display of optimism is treated as being a power-grabbing scheme, or worse, naivety.
The things cynics end up attacking in the end isn't the power grabbing per se, but the optimism.
The answer is not to attack everything optimistic, but also neither to attack nothing. Life is hard.
That is what is derogatorily called cynicism in the OP. Perhaps as one studies history they find that all forms of positive change conceivable by mere humans have been co-opted and are accounted for in the extremely energetic struggle of the system to remain alive, as it has been selected for very much Darwinistically.
> That is what is derogatorily called cynicism in the OP.
Then, there are clearly two things being called cynicism here.
Arguing that the author is wrong because X is good when the author is actually talking about Y is a fruitless exercise.
> Perhaps as one studies history they find that all forms of positive change conceivable by mere humans have been co-opted and are accounted for in the extremely energetic struggle of the system to remain alive, as it has been selected for very much Darwinistically.
That still doesn't and won't ever mean that positive change is negative. If you're still throwing the baby with a bathwater, you're the bad kind of cynic.
Ultra-agree, that a lot of cynicism- against from those in power & who need others to enlist in the message- is due. But I think there's a general level of mistrust, of wanting to pick easy/simple/dependable paths, of resisting good/bold/better, that's just a personal "pragmatism" which is really cynicism in disguise.
I don't think most engineering departments & product-development-organizations give anywhere near a fair shake to doing good, to trying for better. There's so many meetings called to discuss options, to try to suss out where to go, that revolve around mistrust, that are simply a hunt for security. And there's a good chance these hunts for security are right, that mediocrity would better serve us all. But theres ongoing & persistent resistance, un-understanding of better, that pervades, and I'd like to see a little more optimism, a little more shared idea of possibility about. I think there's a lot of possibility that we consign away, a lot of true organizational excellence (& personal glory along with it) that the easier/safer paths ignore.
I also think HN is a classic, key demonstration of cynicism. I feel like a lot of new ideas presented get slammed, that the critics have a field day. I'd love a broad asssessment of positive/negative valence of posts. My gut feeling is that the novel gets extremely hostile reception here. Someone combined mutable torrents with webtorrent[1], & there felt like such vast continuing cynicism, such "what are the use cases?", such tearing it down, such disbelief & resistance. This just feels like one of endless countless examples of cyncism & disbelief, such desire to disregard, to put the new, potential, positives into a box that can be safely disregarded. This to me is the poison we swallow.
For sure. 100%. Be wary of what people are selling. Be wary of the power-grabbing. But I think we ought try to wire ourselves to be positive if we can. We should look for the tell-tale signs, & try to promote & support the potentially good, the things that may have merit, to have optimism. While calling out the specific delusions & exploitionations that may be afoot.
It's a balancing. But we should try, try try try, to find optimism. Just not without disregarding reason.
The internet (well, just worldwide connectivity IMO) has turned cynicism into a social signaling mechanism, it's not just HN. Cynical "dunks" burnish your qualifications to your in-group: make a "hot take" against US democrats, CRT, cryptocurrencies, management, VCs, capitalism, pastafarianism, you name it, and you'll get all your fellow in-group folks upvoting/retweeting/liking your "hot take". IMO this is the greatest threat of all; once group-identity politics are tied to takedowns, there's a huge incentive for dunking on ideas, which makes folks with new/weird ideas defensive about their own and therefore damages novel discourse. I'm not going to say I haven't been drawn into this myself at times but I try to think above it.
I'm having a very hard time trying to understand what you are trying to communicate here: there's a quite divergent set of topics that have been lumped together as hostile, dangerous, & negative, & it doesn't compute for me. I'm going to take things one by one, so we can talk particulars & explore how we see these.
> The internet (well, just worldwide connectivity IMO) has turned cynicism into a social signaling mechanism, it's not just HN.
We're cutting to the punch here, but: a lot of the thing you are about to list sound less like "the internet" & more like general society waking up & understanding what's less than optimal.
> make a "hot take" against US democrats,
They're pretty useless absolutely but the opposition has been stalwartly effective. Bernie wasn't that far off from being president & even though he's far outside the current party, the core consitutents desire far far more from this party. A lot of democrats-the-people loath the uselessnessness. Hot takes are deserved against any party that has gotten so little done. But also, most democrats are pretty sympathetic to how impossible the situation has been, how constitutionally rigged everything has been against them getting any chance to do anything. It's been decade after decade of democrats having zero actual chance to pass anything meaningful, other than, say, Romneycare. the demorat's are slammable but we all know there's not in many's lifetime been a single chance to determine whether they're actually useful or not.
Mostly deserved & out of touch higher echelon's detached from ground truth. The one exception IMO: I don't see any dunking against Critical Race Theory (CRT)s that doesn't come off as maligning & poisonous. There's no popular way to be anti-woke, yay.
> pastafarianism
Again a weird conflation of that which is slammed versus that which slams & is woke. No one makes "hot takes" against pastafarianism. We all know they are already warm saucy goodness. Pastafarians don't make hot takes against anyone else. Like CRT, like US democrats, they're just trying to do good; they only want progress, there's no possession with tearing down the bad or other.
To return to our seeming core disagreement, you said:
> Cynical "dunks" burnish your qualifications to your in-group:
This feels like turning a hunt for oppression into a reason to disregard people. Many groups deserved to be dunked on, BECAUSE THEY ARE CYNICAL. Because they are inaccessible, not open, not participating, not doing enough, doing bad, or outright acting in bad faith.
It's difficult to figure out exactly where any voice is positioned, but, critical review that says: "you are not being optimistic enough": that's (sometimes) not cynical. Just because review is negative does not make it cynical. One can have higher expectations & use those to stage critical reviews.
> it's not just HN. Cynical "dunks" burnish your qualifications... you'll get all your fellow in-group folks upvoting/retweeting/liking your "hot take". IMO this is the greatest threat of all
I've walked point by point through how I don't see your listed examples as bad or hazarous or cynical. There's due cynicism against bad, there's due well wishes for the good to be better. I'm not completely opposed- there's certainly a critical air about- but to me it's not the internet & a lot of those airs are resistive to oppressionaries, are optimistic in nature. It is a very critical time, absolutely, but I don't see much of the critiques as cynical or performative or harmful: I see them as part of a direly needed push out of the long rut society has been stuck in, & a drive towards better. And one that isn't trying to harm or damage, but to simply make aware, to share.
> there's a quite divergent set of topics that have been lumped together as hostile, dangerous, & negative, & it doesn't compute for me
I don't mean to say that any of these in particular are or are not hostile, dangerous, or negative. They were examples of issues that people like to have "dunks" or "hot takes" on.
> Again a weird conflation of that which is slammed versus that which slams & is woke. No one makes "hot takes" against pastafarianism. We all know they are already warm saucy goodness. Pastafarians don't make hot takes against anyone else. Like CRT, like US democrats, they're just trying to do good; they only want progress, there's no possession with tearing down the bad or other.
I'm not trying to sort these into sides. That's my point.
> This feels like turning a hunt for oppression into a reason to disregard people. Many groups deserved to be dunked on, BECAUSE THEY ARE CYNICAL. Because they are inaccessible, not open, not participating, not doing enough, doing bad, or outright acting in bad faith.
> It's difficult to figure out exactly where any voice is positioned, but, critical review that says: "you are not being optimistic enough": that's (sometimes) not cynical. Just because review is negative does not make it cynical. One can have higher expectations & use those to stage critical reviews.
> There's due cynicism against bad, there's due well wishes for the good to be better. I'm not completely opposed- there's certainly a critical air about- but to me it's not the internet & a lot of those airs are resistive to oppressionaries, are optimistic in nature. It is a very critical time, absolutely, but I don't see much of the critiques as cynical or performative or harmful: I see them as part of a direly needed push out of the long rut society has been stuck in, & a drive towards better.
The long rut of what, on what time scale, when? When was it "better" and when did it become "worse"? It wasn't that long ago that McCarthyism was used to bully political sides, when the US and the Soviet Union propped up brutal puppet regimes to fight proxy wars, when Africa/India/China was divided into an arbitrary map of colonial powers, when queer folks were unacceptable in the general public while being ruthlessly bullied (and this continues to this day!) in private, when Muslims/Arabs/South Asians were regularly frisked in Western airports, when people of color had their lives ruined for the possession of token amounts of recreational drugs. It's always been this way.
My point has nothing to do with either "side". That some of these are negative things by some and positive things by other is also something that I understand and accept. My point is that, when you create group-identity, you begin to get dialogue like "because fuck capitalism" that gets many upvotes/shares/engagement, instead of nuanced arguments like "there's no recourse for labor to fall back onto when management manipulates them". What that does is it crowds out the voices of people interested in novel ideas ("what if I get dunked on for being socialist/capitalist/Georgist/whatever") and shifts the dialogue away from problems and solutions into in-group signaling ("yeah I'm gonna upvote all the anti-capitalist posts because f*** the 1%!"). It's a culture that makes people defensive and adversarial ("ugh I wanna see what IPFS is all about but they're associated with Filecoin which is crypto and all my friends hate crypto so I shouldn't") instead of supportive and uplifting. It also then incenitivizes people ("huh I get lots of upvotes when I hate on <X>, so I should keep doing it") to keep up the cycle of hot takes. When cynicism meets group-identity politics, you get IMO the worst case.
My unpopular opinion, have healthy dose of cynicism, optimism and pessimism. You will need to use them in different set of situations. And then there is the question of default, cultural differences. Show in the picture below :)
the #1 advice I would give to a young engineer entering their career is to do everything they can to avoid becoming cynical. technology has cycles, but it also moves forward. it's a helix. most people who churn through a few cycles end up becoming cynical, failing to see the orthogonal dimension of progress.
how to avoid cynicism? the primary way is to remove cynics from your life, and add optimists. second to that, keep working on new enough areas that you maintain a beginners mindset and can offset some of the pattern matching that leads one to thinking everything worthwhile has been done before.
People who disagree automatically feel like they have new information to bring, while it's often hard to express agreement while still feeling like you're adding to the conversation.
In fact, I would call it a hyper-dimensional helix. :-) With each new iteration (or rewrite), we're often expanding in a conceptual dimension we couldn't realistically reach or even imagine before.
"Removing cynics from your life" sounds a lot like living in a bubble. Like exclusively watching Disney movies and thinking that is the general mindset. Instead try to accept reality for what it is.
I like the people I follow but they get like 5 likes on interesting things they have to say, and 500 likes on depressing takes like "computers were a mistake", or "everything is bad because capitalism" or fake uplifting content like "my title is senior engineer and I googled a thing today, normalize failure". I think twitter algorithm promotes that kind of content and I guess they have to adopt if they want their follower count to go up.
I just wish the controls were more granular. There's people I follow for their actual posting who also just drag in a bunch of drama that they hit like on.
> By realizing that the world is always changing, and by stopping to complain, we opt out of seeing the world through cynical glasses, and become part of the change. When we realize that our life can change, we can change it.
i think cynicism is a survival tactic that people adopt, when facing a reality that they can't possibly change. Change is not always an option, unfortunately.
Also cynicism isn't synonymous with complaining - it's more a way of looking at things, that also comes with its own kind of humour.
The author sounds like an apologete of "Four temperaments" theory. He believes cynic == someone who believes in "no change" and complains a lot. Then he labels people as either "cynics" or not. It is as simple as that. (BTW, that is not the definition of a cynic at all)
Human personalities are extremely complicated, and the best you can do is correlate traits given a huge amount of data which he probably does not have. So we have him boasting a theory, that is likely based on the fundamental attribution errors in his experiences, and people, who vote his post up, who happen to have a similar sentiment with a few anecdata (who would also probably disregard any anti-anecdata in this thread).
So is the nature of most Internet posts about psychology.
Cynical people don't found unicorn startups, don't win marathons and seldom the Nobel prize. On the other hand, not being cynical increases your chance to achieve such goals by 0.00001%, while your chance to end up a broke hobo, a beat down athlete or a 50 y/o teaching assistant waiting for tenure shoot up exponentially.
All in all, cynicism sounds (to a cynic) like a pretty good adaptation strategy to the real world.
I'd argue the optimum strategy requires you be at least a little optimistic.
Humans are biased to outweigh the importance of losses vs gains when considering expected value. At a minimum a some optimism is required to offset this bias.
I completely disagree that cynicism is about complaining.
Cynicism is, as the author says, about never challenging the status quo because you believe it's an already lost battle.
Cynicism can be about complaining, but only if you don't do anything about the situation you complain about.
I've always been one to complain about a lot of things. When I was studying CS my friends and classmates were annoyed that I was always voicing my complaints to the staff / teacher / university, and I was known as a professional complainer.
Well guess what? More often than not, complaining got me what I wanted.
I complained to the university that a teacher was just showing us Youtube videos and not evaluating any of our assessments, he got investigated by the school in his next class and isn't teaching there anymore now. I complained that a project was graded based on time to completion, when the time was depending on how fast the teaching assistant was answering each group, they decided it was unfair and didn't grade this project.
The term complaining is overloaded. What you describe is actively doing something to make the problem go away.
The "no complaint challenge" [0] linked from the article gives a pretty good definition of the type of complaining the author talks about:
I defined “complaining” for myself as follows: describing an event or person negatively without indicating next steps to fix the problem.
So "the teacher is just showing us YouTube videos, what a waste of time" is a complaint while "the teacher is just showing us YouTube videos, I'll go talk to whomever is in charge so he stops doing that" is not.
> "describing an event or person negatively without indicating next steps to fix the problem"
That's an absurd restriction.
1) Complaining does not require people to have the expertise to provide a solution. You can complain about a painful tooth and the dentist will handle that.
2) Complaining has social value, especially in democracies. It created social movements that pushed for political change.
I think we can make the distinction between complaining and venting at that point, and the second one would at least serve the purpose of putting your mind at ease for some time.
And to be fair I don't think your example is particularly well suited here, because changing the patent system would most likely need more support than just your own actions, which can be gathered via HN. It can also lead other people to reflect on the issue and take actions themselves.
I would still classify that as complaining.
If I had to choose an example of venting, I'd say that I could go on HN to complain about the neighbor's dog that barks all day long. Nothing would come out of that, and I don't need anyone supporting any action on this problem, so it'd be venting.
This is an important point. One of the things I really disliked about life in Italy was the cynical, defeatist attitude prevalent among certain people. "All the politicians are corrupt", "nothing will ever change", "why bother trying, they won't let anything happen", and so on and so forth. I realized it's a great way to ensure that nothing happens or changes.
I don't think I share the author's definition of cynicism. For me, it's more like the opposite of naïveté. Meanwhile, I also consider myself an optimist about the big picture and the long-term. I just think everyone is self-interested while I subscribe to political realism (i.e. everything is power dynamics) and pragmatism (i.e. evaluation depends on purpose.) It's just that I think that can all be true and things can also turn out fine and people can have meaningful relationships too. I just default to skepticism and distrust. Why? Because I find it to be a much more predictive theory of the world and it produces better results as far as I can tell. Since I can use that and have faith at the same time, I don't really see the downside. You just have to learn to separate the two aspects.
>political realism (i.e. everything is power dynamics)
Can you explain how that doesn't apply to everything else? I see every interaction as power dynamics.
I agree with your points and your ideas, are you saying that not being naive, you are cynical because its an accurate model of reality, like the slippery slope "fallacy"
The article seems to say that we should change our models when its useful to, instead of rationalizing it, the challenge seems like something worth trying though. We need to be delusional sometimes, its useful too.
I think it does apply to "everything" else. I'd also add I think those interactions are more than power dynamics too. I think you'd agree, I just wanted to be clear.
Yes, I see it as a spectrum with naïveté and cynicism as the extremes as far as a descriptive framework of how the world works and I think I'm near the latter extreme in my definition of it.
Yes, that's why I said defaulting to distrust and skepticism. One should always allow the possibility to be convinced otherwise. There's no way to build relationships or really get anything done otherwise.
I think the sad thing is that like the article said, we fall into those patterns because we see it all too commonly, and because negative information travels faster, its easy to etch that into our brains. Its useful to be delusional, a lot of new business owners are and some even make it despite the odds! One example is marijuana legalization, amazing how fast its gone, if someone told me that I would be able to put an 8th of weed into a cartridge, buy it for $20 and it not to have a smell in a few years I would call them insane. Good things are happening, and like you said things can get better (depending on your measurement of better), but not being naive is often the more useful action, although there are times I dived into something hoping for the best, it not working out most of the time, but the times it did, I don't regret it. In the US I saw Oregon decriminalize drugs, and as a trend I would hope to see more of that and I am going to be more optimistic about that occuring.
I think its best summed up as I regret not doing things rather than trying and not succeeding, as long as (like you said) it was a pragmatic risk.
When you’ve been scammed, disappointed, heartbroken, cheated out, beaten up too many times in life, you will approach new things with cynicism.
So many times things in life do not live up to expectations. Often you think you’re interacting with someone but really you’re just interacting with their ego, there is no genuine connection. They build up a rapport with you so they could later cash in on their influence and make you hand over what they really want.
The general incompetence of society, the proud ignorance of people who have dug themselves into holes, it makes you look like an asshole for not fitting in, just for minding your own business and doing what’s best for you. How can one not be a cynic in this kind of world? Everything new you come across is likely to disappoint.
You seem to be focussing very much on the problems with other people, and with society. It is true that society has major problems and that, in your life, you will regularly encounter predators of all stripes. And that those predators apparently enjoy comfort, success and even admiration that others find difficult to access.
But on the other hand, I would feel pretty sad if it is the case that you (or anyone) are so consumed by this that you cannot find joy or purpose in your own life.
Sometimes it is the more profitable strategy to realise and accept that it is very difficult or impossible for one person to fix the major and obvious failings with reality. But it is actually quite achievable, through introspection and rational thinking, to identify and modify our own reactions to those things when our reactions are negatively impacting our ability to experience a quota of joy and happiness that is sufficient to keep negative ruminations about the world to a manageable level.
At the end of the day, we are just animals. And for whatever reason, nature has seen to it that we are quite capable of experiencing a reasonable amount of joy and happiness just by going through the activities required of us to sustain our lives. Breathing, drinking, eating, moving around, fighting, cooperating, resting, attempting to reproduce, and so on.
If it were not so, then what would be the likelihood of our continuing to be here? Given that we must go through many years of this stuff, without giving up, in order to pass on our genetic material before we either kill ourselves or die.
Unfortunately I'm not sure offhand where that saying originated, but I think it is true, at least for me.
I'll spare you a lecture on it because, believe me, I'm no expert. But it is an expression I try to remind myself of from time to time to cope with people and things that might anger me.
Nothing wrong with having expectations. Things are supposed to be good. Marriages are supposed to be forever. Justice is supposed to be done. Politicians are supposed to be honest. Governments are supposed to look out for us. Companies are supposed to provide good products and services.
Obviously reality falls short of expectations no matter what we do. Enough disappointment will demoralize anyone. It will shatter their understanding of the world, their sense of right and wrong, of cause and effect. Cynicism is born when the disturbing realities become the new expectations. Cynicists expect the world to keep disappointing them.
I didn't mean to say it was wrong to have expectations.
I should have elaborated I guess, but tried to keep it short.
I have high expectations for people and things that are important and close to me, and low expectations for things not as important to me or out of my control.
It doesn't mean I don't care about some of those other things at all. It's just that I only have a limited amount of mental and emotional energy to spend, and I try to spend it wisely.
Edit: hmm, maybe I'm sort of a cynic if I have low expectations. But I don't really think of myself that way. I try to be optimistic and focus on things I can do and not dwell on what I can't.
I started my early twenties with a positive and optimistic outlook on life, humanity and how my life would progress.
However after a decade where I've lost a parent, failed a few relationships, going through multiple burnouts at work and last but most severe supporting my partner through two cancer treatments (which is thoroughly a hard stop for us trying to start a family) I have been fully transformed from that initial outlook and into a cynic.
And it feels uncomfortable, as it is not the skin I feel used to wearing.
So if nothing else, this article at least directed me towards this no-complain challenge, which I think I'll give a go. For that I'm grateful.
For the Cynics, the purpose of life is to live in virtue, in agreement with nature. As reasoning creatures, people can gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which is natural for themselves, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, and fame, and even flouting conventions openly and derisively in public. Instead, they were to lead a simple life free from all possessions.
Scenario 1: Condition on a future world that is somehow livable and sane, in mental and environmental equilibrium. Work backwards and find that "being good" is not a choice but an inescapable requirement
Scenario 2: Posit that the above conditioning is unattainable, we have reached "peak humanity" and its all now terminally downhill
Call me naive but I think our main problem is that people have never really been forced to make up their minds "en masse", not just on "local" problems where cynicism, free-riders, aggression, exploitation, abuse (+ name your favorite pathology here) may be "rational", but in our "global" problem.
Universal principles and rights (as those put together by the UN) start becoming the mental and emotional guides to come to grips with the important global constraints. Cynics dismiss those as ludicrous, bureaucratic, vacuities. Think again.
In other words, we can be local cynics (and that might even be a breath of fresh air) but we cannot be global cynics.
I tried to read the article and I tried to read the comments here. What are the actual recommendations here? So far I couldn't catch that.
I realize as I grow older that cynicism has crept in. To be fair at least in the business I operate in I have observed that the more cynical the analysis the more clarity is brought to the table when making decisions and laying strategy.
Unfortunately I have observed the same in my private social life, and to be honest it sucks.
This is mainly regarding people's real intentions and motivations. I would like for this to be not true, and would not mind for another path and another reality.
I also feel like it wasn't like that before in the past, but it may have been because I found myself under the umbrella of educational institutions and people's motivations were probably biased (positively) as people's goals were mostly somewhat influenced by the institution.
Cynicism directly proportional to aging brain and wisdom. It’s an mechanism to weed out assholes and situations wrapped with assholes in the precious few years you gotta live. Sets in at mid 40s.
> By realizing that the world is always changing, and by stopping to complain, we opt out of seeing the world through cynical glasses, and become part of the change. When we realize that our life can change, we can change it.
The world isn't always changing for the better. And to be dead honest, seeing how covid unfolded and how it was handled, I'm more skeptical than ever. We have control over a lot of things in our lives and to be honest at no point in time in my life would I have imagined I'd be where I am now. It certainly turned out a lot better than my expectations during the first years of my adulthood. But sure enough there are a number of things in my life which are far worse than I would have anticipated and quite frankly I don't see anything I can do about them, yet plenty of them keep me up awake at night. And in those instances being cynical isn't necessarily a bad thing. And here we have the semantics and namely Diogenes who is widely known for his cynicism: he was anything but fond of ancient Greeks and his attitude towards them was exactly that: cynical. However, he was equally eager to change their living conditions. And I admit - I'm extremely cynical very often and in some instances this pushes me to change the things I dislike about me or my surroundings to the best of my abilities. Of course there are the instances which I mentioned earlier which are outside my control in which case... You know... Whatever, might as well shoot a few blanks for the sake of it.
I use a style of cynicism to maintain access to early growth. Things that grow typically do so explosively and in a non-linear way from very small initial states. "From shit, flowers grow," is an adage I use a lot, and you need exposure to the shit to get exposure to the growth. However, after a while, it does make my views smell a bit after spending that much time in it.
However, let's say Santa Claus is a vast conspiracy by parents to decieve children, and while nobody could seriously believe any group that large could keep that secret, generation after generation does it. Christmas happens every year one way or another. We go along with it because we are emasculated liars, with our ugly sweaters and insufferable canned music, bending to the objectively absurd narrative that defies basic rationality and physics, one as implausible as the origin story of some deranged peninsular dictator, all so as not to be isolated and exiled. We justify our participation in the lie, one that teaches children to normalize disappointment, that their parents construct elaborate webs of nested deceptions to get their attention, and that the gifts aren't for you, they are to make themselves happy. Your parents are joy-vampires.
That was meant to sound unhinged, but it's to illustrate the point that cynicism can be convincingly simulated without a lot of effort, which means it is a pattern of thought that is necessarily one of many you can actively choose from. It's funny, but it also can become a vice, where it can become a substitute for humor (ask how I know). The other adage I use a lot is that if you smell shit everywhere you go, check your shoes.
The test I would use is, if you can figure out how to make money or even find joy from a hypothesis predicated on the contrarian - but still fact - that Santa isn't real, you may have healthy cynicism, and I'd be very interested in hearing it. Chances are you can't, and the best we can do is become a Santa truther, where we tell people Christmas was an inside job, and we only invented the Easter bunny to convince us that the rest is real.
Cynicism can be very valuable, but I don't think we can understand the value of it as a tool without being able to also laugh about it, because (imo) the humor is the only way to be really sure the cynicism isn't the only tool we have.
Thanks for sharing. I briefly mentioned that "never changing" world in the article but didn't expand on it there. But it was a super strong emotion which motivated this essay and shift in outlook.
If you are going to trust all people and their claimed motivations without thinking, you are going to set yourself as a victim.
Would it be cynical to wonder who benefits from such credulity? b^)
Actually the most vocal seldom benefit from their "optimism". Sometimes they are hired by those who do benefit, so they get a sort of indirect benefit.
I think the OP (and some other people saying the same thing) are tired of all the criticism coming through the internet. Being unable to specifically name the aggressive audience, those people are just called cynics or pessimists, clearly based on their behaviors. However, to my eyes, it's just a whole bunch trolls, thus it's just an internet noise. I don't think there's anything we can do with it...
I live in a country where free speech is being suppressed more and more each day, and this “no-complain” mentality is exactly what purveyors of state propaganda use against the opposition to silence criticism.
It is easy to talk about tackling problems head-on when they are solvable on the individual scale, but anybody who encourages this “no complaining” mentality and without any qualifiers should not be taken seriously. It’s likely that the author doesn’t yet know the purpose that complaints or criticism play in feedback loops and how they trigger improvement… and even then, anybody who’s lived long enough would know that there are just some things that are bigger than our own selves and which aren’t battles worth fighting, unless you already have some kind of privilege or advantage or cosmologically-written fate that could increase your chances of effecting the change that you want to happen.
>" A cynicism frame and mindset that turns a lot of my life into a zero-sum game."
I don't accept the premise.
Is this cynicism or outright pessimism?
>"There was always this feeling that attempts at improvements are futile. If anyone tried to improve the system in any way, they will face a great opposition, and any value they bring forward will be immediately vultured away."
>"...if someone created a coin operated parking meter, another one will quickly figure out how to steal the coins out of it. Thus, the attempt to bring order will fail..."
Cynical take, "People will abuse this system"
Pessimistic, uncreative take, "Don't even bother. Better to exploit what presently exists than attempt to create. That's what everyone else is doing, therefore I must follow the status quo."
Cynical innovative take, "It could work but it needs to be secure. The best would be if we can gamify their greed..."
To see less cynicism we would have to live in a meritocracy, everyone being rewarded according to the things they do. But since most people and all people in the positions of power seem to try to get a larger piece of the pie for themselves, regardless of actual merits, not being cynical seems to put you in a losing situation.
Being cynical does not mean being pessimistic. It does not mean to always think bad about other people. It means seeing things close to what they are. Yes, there is goodwill and kindness and altruism. And you should recognize them when you come across them. Just don't assume that anyone is being kind and good. Try to find what is the goal people are following when they say or do something. Because there is always a goal. Which might fit your own goals or not.
I realized I may be that much of an optimist that I don't even really understand what's it like to be a cynic. To me it seems a cynic, from how the author describes them, is a total downer and asshole who I wouldn't want to be around with it.
Having healthy grasp of reality to me is in no way harmful. On the contrary, it should be desired. Perhaps it's the hopeless atmosphere in countries with high corruption and badly working government which just saps your hope, and you stop believing things could actually work if people worked for common good.
As I myself do have a snarky view of the current world politics and whatnot but still can enjoy things, don't really complain, put things in trash bins and help strangers and so forth.
Steve Yeggie's Note from the Magic Bus[1] is a decade old, & rambles through the particulars of the day, but it's still the canonical read on how you predispose yourself, on whether you opt into belief or disbelief. It's lessons have stuck with me for a long time. There's a lot of concern & fear & doubt, skepticism about the corporate environment, about other engineers, and the skepticism is all so due; there's a responsible & safe desire to stick to the known & secure. And yet, and yet...
Steve helped me unshackle myself; kick-started a thinking about what values were really important to me, not just professionally, but what kind of a person I wanted to be amid the environment in which I am thrown. The corporate capitalist world (& to a lesser degree the young-guns-ultra-productive engineering departments) deserves deep cynicism. I've heard so many good & great intents put off, and so many wild betterments ignored. But Steve helped me find an inner stoic that insisted on, that demanded- that believed in- progress, in other engineers, in trying for extra, in myself, in doing good, even when it probably wasn't going to be convenient or easy. Engineering is filled with cynicism & this made clear what a spectrum our opinions lay across, laid bare how cynical, how pessimistic most of the world about me was.
I endeavor to help & support others, to try for good, in ways that I would never have thought about for reading Notes from the Magic Bus. I still await such a clear & obvious life-changing post appearing ever again. This one's alright. But it doesn't deal close enough with the conflict, with how horrid it can be, suffering the un-smart gumption of the erring-do-wellers. It helped convince me to try to help see things along a lot, even if the picks & choices aren't necessarily totally what I would do. To be optimistic, not just in my own sphere, but in working with others. Please, read. Let me, let us know what you think.
This is strange to me. I feel like I am very cynical about the business, but I have almost no ill will toward other programmers or their approaches at all. For me the issue is looking up the managemet chain, or outside at the effects of my changes.
I can safely say that I have never as a programmer implemented a feature that I thought made anyone's life better. My software has consistently turned the screws in on people's lives, either in their work life by making monotonous internal tools or in their personal life by removing autonomy and choice. I take magicians and turn them into mechanical Turks. I take people and turn them into consumers/users/addicts.
This isn't supposed to be a diatribe, just contributing my N=1 that Notes from the Magic Bus seems cute and superficial to me, defending the culture of office politics by elevating it to the importance of actual politics.
> I can safely say that I have never as a programmer implemented a feature that I thought made anyone's life better. My software has consistently turned the screws in on people's lives, either in their work life by making monotonous internal tools or in their personal life by removing autonomy and choice. I take magicians and turn them into mechanical Turks. I take people and turn them into consumers/users/addicts.
Shouldn't you take a systemic approach? Individuals can do lots of things, but until it turns systemic, is there a reason to adopt this negativity-first mindset? (And even then, I think OP makes a good case for why one shouldn't.) Kids were shitty to me in middle school, but I don't think I should indemnify all of humanity because of that.
Why would I take a systemic approach to my own singular life? I make art now, and I get a lot of joy in it. The path out wasn’t to change myself but to remove myself from what I found to be soulless work.
> The path out wasn’t to change myself but to remove myself from what I found to be soulless work.
These aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible for something to be bad _for you_ but not be bad _for everyone_, especially if there are particular circumstances around you that cause the experience to be bad. It's like deciding never to date again after a bad relationship (which certainly has crossed the minds of friends of mine). It's not about changing yourself, it's about keeping an open mind.
All the best outcomes exist in the additive economic space. We have reflected this in the mathematical evidence for cooperation.
Cynicism and nihilism are emotionally easy excuses not to try that lead to a variety of impoverishments. [Edit: they are conveniently self reinforcing too.]
"By realizing that the world is always changing, and by stopping to complain, we opt out of seeing the world through cynical glasses, and become part of the change. When we realize that our life can change, we can change it."
The author actually meant this:
"By realizing that the world is always changing, when we stop complaining, we opt out of seeing the world through cynical glasses, and become part of the change. When we realize that our life can change, we can change it."
The meaning of the original text to a native English speaker is, I think, the exact opposite of what the author intended.
Otherwise, great thought-provoking article, and I think I'll try that no complain challenge. Interesting discussion here too.
The thing is this is only a cynical political world view. Political in the larger sense that also includes the machinations of corporations and NGOs, but still only limited to a certain area of life.
You'll truly darken when you start seeing your everyday relations in the same way, and you don't have to.
I also tend to see large orgs in a cynical light, mainly because everyone I know says bad things about them.
But I find that plenty of people are still good people. You can still deal with them with your cards on the table, and they do the same with you. Plus there's plenty of things to appreciate that aren't rivalrous, eg nerd knowledge, that are interesting and create a bond when you can share them.
Hmm, this article starts with building its own straw-man cynic to argue against for the rest of it.
I think it is naive to define a cynic as a character whole (which sounds a lot like nihilism instead). People can be immensely cynical and yet positive, cynical but with a view to do something about it, cynical and miserable. It is not an absolute.
A lot of the comments here seem to be attempting to find nice quotes that can then be used for labelling outlooks on life to be attributed to.
Complaining is cathartic! I'm off to listen to some Bobby McFerrin while I yell at clouds :)
> By realizing that the world is always changing, and by stopping to complain, we opt out of seeing the world through cynical glasses ... When we realize that our life can change, we can change it.
i think that "cynicism" is a loaded term, and that creating a dogma against it can be a form of toxic positivity. pretending that something is good, when it obviously is not, is gaslighting plain and simple. gaslighting is a form of abuse that breeds actual, lasting cynicism, and it must be avoided at all costs.
that said, non-constructive complaining can also create and spread caustic and degenerate mindsets.
like everything, it's a balance.
applying habit tracking to one's own complaining is a great idea though!
Ah, yes. Another "guru" confusing skepticism with cynicism.
People are usually resistant to change, because 95% of ideas to change something are laughably bad, or not well thought out.
If you find yourself talking to too many "cynics", then the problem is you! Propose better ideas, that don't sound ridiculous or too far-fetched. Present them with a detailed plan to achieve win-win goals.
Complaining != cynicism. I would not recommend laying off one of the tools for communicating one‘s needs. Instead, I‘d recommend learning to communicate more constructively, like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
I have a constant battle in my being between cynicism, stoicism and romanticism. I feel like a mixture of all three no matter how immiscible the underlying philosophies are. It's like a constant battle between diogenes, marcus aurelius, and keats.
I think it's important to be realistic - but also to be earnest and let yourself be taken away by emotion on occasion.
What do you do when the context itself is cynical? Like an authoritarian regime. In those cases “just being optimistic” is a laughable suggestion. This extends to the class and race struggle within “free” societies. To me, there’s a deep link between being oppressed and being cynical. When you’re left without choices you develop a “fixed” mindset.
Everyone has choices. Authoritarian regimes are overthrown, slavery outlawed, political and economic participation broadened. The world is, very objectively, tremendously better to live in for the vast majority of people, than it was 200 years ago.
Sure, there are contexts where the individual's choices that could lead to substantial improvement are so risky and the chances of success so small that it's rational not to try. But that's still a choice. All that cynicism does is dress up that choice as having no alternatives so you can feel better about it. Which is a totally human and understandable thing to do, but can easily be taken too far and applied in contexts where individual incremental improvements are absolutely possible and have a good chance of success.
Sure. But notice that in the case of American black people’s plight, that’s the voice of the oppressor: “just be optimistic, work harder”. Meanwhile the oppressor cynically tightens the screws of oppression, e.g. by codifying racism into laws while making it illegal for black people to vote. So I would be careful insisting, again, that the victims of racism just choose positivity. Sure, there is a deep truth in that — ultimately you have to chose positivity to survive. But repeating that over and over is a cynical badge of racism.
There are still choices between finding ways to work within the system and making the best of the situation or completely giving up and resigning to the fact that nothing will ever get better.
> "I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."
> Antonio Gramsci in a Letter from Prison (December 1929)
I think this is probably the correct position to take, and I try to hold on to it. I often fail to have optimism of the will, but I suppose pessimism of the intelligence is better than simple cynicism.
He is right.
Optimism is, so far, the best cure for reality.
At least the part not under control, so almost all of it.
But, you may prefer it in its more elegant form of survivorship bias.
Reality is a harsh mistress.
Most have to put on their beer goggles to embrace her.
Just curious, why does reality have to be "cured?"
Living means feeling pain and pleasure, triumph and defeat, love and hate, grief and bliss. I would challenge anyone to prove that you can have any one of those without its opposite.
Borrible, your reality does not have to be feared. You can embrace it. Only then can you experience.
In my experience cynics are just people who are afraid of the things they wish to be true, never becoming true, so they start to prophetically denounce the possibility of them ever being true to lift themselves of the curse of the hopes they hold deep inside. A bit like pessimists, but with one degree more of emotional disconnection — a disconnection of which they are sometimes proud of. Everybody knows the cynic telling their disappointed collegue how the signs have been there all along, how they should have known. Hope and actual positive attempts as a sign of being naive.
It is a defense mechanism, that they often confuse with "realism". A defense mechanism that also can successfully protect them of ever becoming happier or being part of any improvement in their environment.
The more you can actually do about it the less sense cynicism makes.
I think that if you are truely an optimist, you believe you are a realist. If being an optimist is a mask you put on for strategic reasons, you are not an optimist.
> According to cynics, the world operates in a certain way, the elites are always the same, and will always be the same.
This already betrays a cynical outlook: “the elites are always the same”.[1] Yes, the world has been run by elites since the agricultural revolution. So now it’s just a fact of life (to the author). Attempts at egalitarianism (i.e. from capitalism to socialism to communism) have failed.
That’s what I am cynical about.
[1] Although you might be perfectly OK with this and thus not a “cynic” about it if you own more wealth than a certain threshold.
I wonder how old is this person. His views strike me as those of a young developer who wasn't around the so called communist days in Bulgaria.
In fact, I'd go as far as saying stuff like this comes almost exclusively from people who may have smelled the bullshit but never had to deal with it. You know, like how young attractive women tend to see things.
Then again, maybe I am wrong and that was my cynicism talking
Most of the ultra successful people I've known were optimists in speech, cynics in action.
Best to participate in the theatre. Once you play a role long enough but also seem "pragmatic" in action, others of the same ilk will find you and invite you behind the curtain.
Right. Gotta do what you can to have the elites notice you and invite you for an initiation ritual into their kooky cult of deeply cynical hypocrisy. Great way to live, right?
One of the great frustrations in these debates, is the tendency to criticize a messenger who sees a cynical system. Instead of blaming the system for being cynical. Sometimes the most Optimistic people are shut out of debates, because they won't assume the system is optimized for a noncynical purpose. My suspicion is that this ostracization is what grows the cynicism out of control.
I think it stems from complaining is lazy. Its much more difficult to see why things are they way they are or see the virtue in things even if they have flaws.
Its not that complaining has no place, its just that most complaining is is the lowest common denominator and doesn’t contribute much.
People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious “possibilist”. That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.
In his book 'Factfulness' (definitely read it), he talks about "bad and better":Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator. The baby’s health status is extremely bad and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen. After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical.
Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling