Uncertainty can be frightening. Few of us can muster the confidence needed to consistently maintain a posture of optimism through life’s many challenging uncertainties. We know we will die … someday. But the date is uncertain. Our children and grandchildren will likely outlive us, however, and they will face additional uncertainty in their lives – their livelihoods, social acceptance, achievement. Have we equipped them with the resources they will need to deal with their own monumental uncertainties? That’s a further burden for us, as well. These days, we also must endure uncertainty about the future of our society and nation … perhaps more so than previous generations.
We somehow need to manage uncertainties about climate change, personal freedom, the stamina of socio-economic structures and hierarchies that have enabled success for multiple generations. Sometimes the future of all these things looks daunting. It’s hard to be optimistic. Optimism seems to require not only great self-confidence, but a selectivity in our perception. We must learn to focus on positive things and minimize the negative. But then we are told by “experts” that we ignore those negative inputs at our peril – whether health-related, political, or climate trends. If the negative stimuli are not addressed, harm will befall us. Hence, optimism is officially discouraged! Little wonder that many of us find so much solace in nostalgia – that symbolic return to the womb – seeking repeated familiar experiences that made us feel good in previous times. I spend my days absorbing political, economic, cultural news and commentary … but love the opportunity to stream, once again, 25-year-old episodes of The West Wing.
Could it be that indulging in such nostalgia steels us to the terrifying uncertainty of our daily lives? We have all been persuaded that Wall Street loathes uncertainty, so why shouldn’t we be scared as well? Apparently, the future must be assaulted – we can’t just “let it happen.” Even the Zen master doesn’t preach that. People are supposed to be active agents in their own destinies. So, we spend our lives building the personal confidence needed to make such an assault on our future – this, some say, is what emotional maturity or growth is all about. We want to “grab life by the balls” to use a crude reference. But then what happens when everybody around us says we’ve succeeded? Do we ignore their assessment of us, and keep pushing at the outer boundaries of life? Or do we redirect our remaining energy to helping others, younger generations perhaps, achieve the guts, stamina, self-confidence, needed to get where we have already gone?
The problem with nostalgia is that it makes life seem too easy. It may work as a respite, a stress reliever, but it must be followed by action – by using those “feel good” vibes to share with others — share knowledge, share resources of any kind, share faith. The counterpoint to all this sharing, however, is the nagging doubt that we really have more resources than we need to begin with. And maybe you can’t decide where to aim your sharing. I’m reluctant to randomly give everything to strangers (I don’t even give to charity as much as I used to, even though, objectively, I have much more than I did years ago.) Saving, conserving our resources, becomes an additional constraint on optimism – otherwise known as risk tolerance. Nostalgia has no risk. But could nostalgia be a dream? Perhaps a dream of the way life should be? Are utopias merely elaborate exercises in nostalgia? Literary utopias and nostalgic revisiting of some idyllic past portray worlds of safety, security, comfort. Seldom do they try to convince their audience that a life of luxury is available … if only. When they do, it’s usually with tongue firmly planted in cheek (see: Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism). The West Wing workplace drama of the White House staff of fictional President Josiah Bartlett portrays a stable, secure, trusting workplace much like the offices many of us Boomer and Gen-X audience members remember, during our own white collar dreams from past years … it is all now pure nostalgia; that world never existed in any real White House, for sure!
The dissonance between Aaron Bastani’s FALC or Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing and reality is largely due to how we want to see other people, versus our actual experience with them. This is where optimism plays an important role. We know from our experience (nostalgic only?) that certain people are genuinely nice, certain people are very talented, and some people even prove to be trustworthy! Since nostalgia is a journey back in time to when we were innocent, more secure, happier, we can say that nostalgic characters are what we used to think of people. If only there were more of them … that is the essence of optimism. Optimists believe there are enough such people to create a better future, given the right conditions, and the rest of us try our best to improve our estimation of people by indulging in nostalgic paeans to imagined times of greater innocence – times when we trusted people.
Somewhere in this equation, we need to find the secret variable that will make it happen. That search, itself, requires a certain level of optimism. We have to want it bad enough. We need the courage to keep looking, even when the search often leads down blind alleys. And we mustn’t lose our agency … we are, indeed, responsible for the outcome. Go, figure it out!
— William Sundwick
Warp and Woof 