Comment by ryandrake
9 days ago
Maybe this is an oversimplification, but optimism is gone from media because people are no longer optimistic about the future. For a long time, the next generation always just kind of assumed they'd have it better than the previous ones. Apart from a couple of terrible historic blips like world wars, of course. Everyone has kind of believed they'd live better lives than their parents. The Baby Boomers were the last generation that really felt that way, and it was by and large true for them. From there on, Gen-X knows already that they'll never live as good as their parents. Milleneals are finding out very quickly the same, the next generation is going to have it worse, and so on. So it's no big surprise that all of our media is doomer and pessimistic.
Maybe if we want more optimism in our media, we should give ourselves something to be optimistic about.
> Maybe if we want more optimism in our media, we should give ourselves something to be optimistic about.
It seems to me that it's the opposite. Stories are how we form our views of the world and our dreams for the future. Therefore if we want to have people who build towards things worthy of optimism, we should start by telling stories that inspire them to be optimistic.
Look at Star Trek - Roddenberry didn't go "well the world is hella racist so I guess the show should be too". He made the show reflect his vision for how we could live a better life, and people responded to that over time. I think we badly need the same thing today.
It's kind of a chicken and the egg, but I feel like 1966 with Vietnam, race riots across the US, the Cuban Missile Crisis only four years past, and everything else was hardly a time that people would have been optimistic.
But you had a guy who had been a bomber pilot in World War Two and flown combat missions against the Japanese, who desperately wanted to put a (gay) Japanese-American who had spent the war in an internment camp into his show, and a black woman (and have her kiss his white male lead star!), and later on, when people seemed to not be getting what he was trying to say, even added a good Russian character (played by an actual Russian-American). Because the point was to show, just like Verne a century earlier, that if truly all of humanity worked together, we could accomplish anything, for example travelling the stars. And so many people were inspired by his vision, and wanted to build his vision, to make his dreams real.
And nowadays the dreams that I see, both in stories and made manifest, seem drab and small and more than a little evil by comparison. And I do think that story-tellers (of whatever medium- very much including start-up founders) need to be aware of the power of their stories, that their myths become real, and have a responsibility to use that power for good and not for evil.
That “long time” is a blip on the historical timeline. Most of history is people expecting things to basically stay the same or to get worse.
We’re talking a few decades at a time in a few places scattered over a couple hundred years, maybe, if we mean the median person in that time and place.
The 20th century got a big optimism and productivity boost from finally all but ending cyclical famines, antibiotics, and vaccines, and most of the stuff since has been of far smaller consequence. We’re coming down off the brief high of Haber-Bosch and penicillin, and haven’t found another fix yet. Computers and the Internet ain’t it, so far.