Wrong
Why do I bother? What is it about this activity called writing that I seem to enjoy despite every reason not to? How, even when I am at my most depressingly convinced that absolutely nobody will read what I put out into the world, do I keep returning to the keyboard, compelled to hammer away at it until something resembling coherent ideas come together?
I don’t ask this out of self-indulgence. Like most of us, I’m aware that today we write more but say less than ever before, that the bumbling homunculus of “misinformation” emerges from this reality. Words, and the ideas that represent them, like everything else, are overproduced, and thus more disposable than any prior time. I know this. And yet something in me cannot help but contribute to the pollution.
Part of it is surely a compulsion, a way of coping with a neurosis so widespread it’s become mundane. When we comment or post or write in the online mall that has replaced nearly every public forum, we are all scratching that itch. The social industry is designed with this in mind. The only thing that separates me and others who try to “professionalize” their output, to arrange their compulsion in the forms of articles or what we might have once called blog posts, is that we are trying, probably in vain, to organize.
And what exactly are we organizing? Our thoughts? Sure, but more than this. To compose something that attempts to be (likely) longer, with more of an arc and argument behind it; this is to push against the cacophonous tide of knowing. The race to come up with the exact and correct and best thing written at the moment, to best all other comers with the snazziest zing: these flatten life into a series of one-ups where anyone who manages to claw their way up the first rung is only bound to be snatched back down to the bottom.
Of all the tools employed by this doomed band of scribes, the strongest and most ubiquitous, the most essential, is negativity. The practice of summing up an event in 240 characters or a picture of your face accompanied by a bit of text your brain vomited up is designed not only to disregard nuance and contingency, but to insist that their existence is heresy. What is can only be what is. Which means that what isn’t is more dangerous than perhaps anything else. The unexpected ways an event's moving parts can shift, the void they leave behind, these consume us if we do not account for them, even (and especially) if we can do nothing to change them.
We know what this kind of worldview – the preoccupation with what is and therefore can only be – looks like. It is often cynical and bloody-minded. But it also relies on an unexpected disposition. That is the disposition of optimism. Optimism isn’t just a bland belief that the good will always prevail. It’s the belief that what is must be easily explained, therefore easily controlled, and therefore, that the good will prevail, whatever the “good” may be. It is an impulse shared in common by conspiracy theorists, the most wooden adherents of Enlightenment thinking, the liberal appeal to the best of “the American tradition,” and yes, much of the left (particularly its terminally online sectors). All are prone to explain away the inexplicable – the “not good” – with a tribal accusation of apostasy. It’s not just disagreement this worldview cannot brook, but even the practice of questions.
Again, we have all seen the outcome. Yes, the unknown will consume us at some point, but not before we consume each other. Optimism, like the written word, is cheap. Easily disproved. But in this world of planned obsolescence, the cheaper something is, the fiercer we cling to it.
When the optimist’s plan of action fails, more often than not it means they are rendered immobile, frozen in place, unable to admit they did something incorrectly. Aware they cannot proceed as they did before, but stuck in stubborn refusal to embrace the pessimism their situation clearly requires, they smilingly retreat. It is one of the reasons why so many who seek the change the world, in whatever fashion, end up doing little more than posting and tweeting, even as we watch social media lose what little purpose it had to begin with.
Pessimism, however, is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s not merely that lower expectations means never being disappointed (though that is perennially true). There is a humility that accompanies pessimism. An admission that one doesn’t know exactly what to do at all times, and therefore the patience to assess and see what, if anything, there actually is to be done. When something works, it isn’t simply a chance to puff out our chests. It is a revelation. If toxic optimism sneers at disagreement, true negativity yearns to be wrong.
