Sumit Paul-Choudhury is a journalist and former Editor-in-Chief of New Scientist. He trained as an astrophysicist, worked as a financial journalist, and received a Sloan Fellowship in strategy and leadership at London Business School. Much of his time is currently devoted to his creative studio, Alternity.
What’s the big idea?
Despite evidence suggesting that the default state of humans individually is optimism for their own lives, collectively we tend to veer toward pessimism. The greatest chance our species has at overcoming global problems is by expanding our positive assumptions to the big picture. Optimism about our world’s trajectory will illuminate possibilities for the future.
Below, Sumit shares five key insights from his new book, The Bright Side: How Optimists Change the World, and How You Can Be One. Listen to the audio version—read by Sumit himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Optimism is universal.
And I do mean universal. Optimism isn’t just a human trait: researchers have found that a wide range of animals also tend to view the world in a positive light. That includes some of the animals we often regard as clever, like monkeys, dogs, and dolphins, but also some you might find surprising, like sheep, chickens, and bumblebees. All these animals, and many others, behave as though a glass of water is half-full.
Humans are animals, too, so you might reasonably expect us to share this positive bias. Psychologists have developed various ways to assess human optimism, ranging from simple Q&A tests to state-of-the-art brain scans. Those tests have different implications for how we look at the world, but all point in the same direction: optimism seems to be the default state of humanity. When it comes to our own lives, we tend to assume that bad things won’t happen to us, but good things will.
2. Optimism is beneficial.
It can’t always be the case that good things will happen to us and bad things won’t. We know that bad things do happen to good people. Charmed lives are the exception, not the norm. That presents a puzzle: Why do psychologically healthy humans hold views of the world that fly in the face of the evidence? We usually believe that mistaken beliefs are ultimately detrimental, but high levels of optimism are associated with longer life, better health, and greater success. This supposedly irrational view of the world seems to be positively beneficial.
Optimism has several potential mechanisms for helping us thrive and succeed. One I find most compelling is its motivational aspect: If we’re open to the idea that the future is full of possibilities, we’re more likely to keep trying to improve our lot and thus discover new opportunities to do so—including ones we didn’t previously know existed.
“High levels of optimism are associated with longer life, better health, and greater success.”
Consider this simple parable. Two mice fall into a milk churn and are trapped, unable to climb out. One, overwhelmed by despair, accepts what it believes is inevitable and soon drowns. The other continues to kick and thrash until its relentless efforts eventually churn the milk into butter, allowing it to scrabble to freedom. The first mouse fell victim to a pessimism trap: it didn’t believe it could escape, so it didn’t. The second mouse was an irrational optimist: it believed it could succeed, despite the evidence, and so it did.
3. Optimism is not universal.
Our innate optimism relates to our own lives and extends to those close to us. But increasingly, we don’t express optimism about the direction that our societies and countries are headed. Surveys show that Americans (like people in many countries) are consistently more negative about their societies’ prospects than their own lives. People will tell you they’re doing okay and that their communities are thriving, but they don’t like how their country is headed. This optimism gap persists even when statistics show that things aren’t so bad after all.
But this isn’t a question of right or wrong. How people feel about their societies affects their behavior. Concerns about the economic downturn make our businesses struggle. Fear of crime makes us withdraw from public life. And suspicion of waning moral standards makes our communities wither. The optimism gap starts to turn into a pessimism trap: We persuade ourselves that there aren’t any viable solutions to our problems. If we want to address that, intuition isn’t enough. We must bring our intellects into the picture.
4. Optimism is about possibility.
People have wondered for millennia about what kind of world we live in: is it basically kind, or cruel? Is there some hidden order behind human affairs that means things will always work out, or is it all just sound and fury? Is there some combination of social progress, economic management, and technological innovation that will unlock continual progress? In fact, the original meaning of optimism came out of such a debate in the capitals of Europe in the 18th century. The great German polymath Gottfried Leibniz proposed that the cosmos was arranged “optimally”—that we live not in a perfect world but the “best of all possible worlds,” meaning the one that was most harmonious and logically consistent. Those who held this view were optimists.
“Optimism is about an openness to possibilities.”
The French satirist Voltaire was not one of them. He wrote a vicious parody of Leibniz into his 1759 novel Candide, or Optimism, as one Doctor Pangloss, who insists that all must be for the best, “in this best of all possible worlds” throughout many dire trials and tribulations. It was hardly a fair critique of Leibniz’s thesis, but it stuck, and optimism has carried connotations of naivety and delusion ever since. I think, though, that Leibniz was on to something. As the example of the mice in the milk churn illustrates, optimism is about an openness to possibilities, and human beings are uniquely equipped to evaluate “possible worlds” in extraordinary depth and detail.
5. Optimism is practical.
One of our greatest gifts is the ability to conjure up scenes that we never experienced or never happened. We can imagine great historical events just as readily as we can the wonders of the far-flung future. What’s more, we can imagine what might have happened if things had gone differently or how things might turn out tomorrow according to what we do today.
Our imaginings are often way off, but we’ve developed powerful technologies that allow us to put them on a more constructive footing: models that allow us to predict the weather or the climate, evidence-based scenarios for how world events might play out, simulations and speculative designs that let us experience potential futures. These help us to chart a path through the possible worlds we might inhabit and navigate our way to the more optimal ones.
Powerful though these technologies are, they are not the most important thing about 21st-century optimism. Most of the challenges we face are collective challenges. I may be optimistic that we can solve our problems, but if we are to solve them, we all need to be optimistic. If we are to put optimism to work, we need not only to practice it ourselves but to assume that others are practicing it, too. We need to be optimistic about optimism.
To listen to the audio version read by author Sumit Paul-Choudhury, download the Next Big Idea App today:
