Lauren Berlant’s analysis of “cruel optimism”—the term she uses to describe “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object”—may be useful here. Berlant asks, “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies . . . when the evidence of their instability [and] fragility . . . abound?” People persist in these attachments, Berlant explains, because the fantasy object provides a “sense of what it means to keep on living and looking forward to being in the world.”75
