Optimism
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Optimism
Different as it sounds, this kind of triumphalism had something in common with paralysed heartbreak. One rested in arrogant assurance, while the other rested in despair. Both saw the future as something offstage, rather than as the thing we were always creating in every moment, whether we acknowledged it or not. And both forgot that essential truth
... See moreJenny Odell • Dear Future, Here’s the One Lesson I Want to Pass on to You
Optimism is a political disposition and a design sensibility.
Seth Goldenberg • Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures
Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic ...
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research
Chatting with @camwiese today about his New World's Fair (which hopes to paint an optimistic, definite vision of the future), I noticed how these projects so often turn to *retro*futurism in art direction. What would a now-rooted, forward-facing hopepunk aesthetic look like?
“And if there is a fundamental difference between the way people perceived the world around them in the past and the way they perceive it at present, then it is perhaps best identified as follows: in the past, activism was coupled with optimism, while today activism requires pessimism.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything
Optimistic Nihilism
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Metamodernism is thus also more optimistic than modernism as it strives to go beyond its shortcomings, and thus inherently more optimistic than postmodernism, which lacks faith in modernity and its metanarrative of progress.