Why Optimism Matters

May 14, 2026

This was a presentation I'd really wanted to do, about optimism: why it matters, and why I think it's important.

I asked everyone to consider two perspectives:

It's okay to feel excited and optimistic about our future. With all of our technology, we're living in the best time in human history.
The future is scary, and we're living in a worse time than the past.

I told everyone up front that I'm probably biased, because I lean optimistic, and that I'd be challenging the second view. I think there's no better time in history to be alive, and that even if you're not sure, it helps to believe it. That doesn't mean being fearless without a reason. It means being optimistic.

Humanism

Humanism goes back to classical Greece and Rome, and it took off during the Renaissance. Humanists believed:

Humans are uniquely amazing and have incredible potential.
Science and learning are ways to understand our world.
Life is finite, so we should make the most of it. Since we're so special, getting to be alive at all is a big opportunity.

It focused more on life in this world than earlier thinking did, though many humanists were still religious.

Discussion questions:

Do you agree or disagree with these ideas?
Why would humanist ideas start when they did, with the printing press, the end of the plague, and the beginning of the Renaissance? (Another example of how your environment shapes how you think.)
How does humanism relate to religion, at a time when the Catholic Church was very powerful? This one was about people starting to question authority.

Post-scarcity and AI

Capitalism is a way of deciding who gets what, and it depends on scarcity: there isn't enough of everything for everyone. But what if, thanks to technology like AI, things stopped being scarce? How would capitalism work then? This is one of the reasons some people are scared about the future.

Discussion questions:

If AI could do anything a human can do, what do you think would happen?
We introduced the idea of a universal basic income, where the government gives everyone a regular payment. How do you think that would work?

The richest man in the world

We read an excerpt I thought was really cool. In 1830, the richest person in the world was Nathan Rothschild. His fortune was worth about 0.6% of Britain's entire national income. But in 1836 he died at 58 from an infection that an antibiotic costing about $10 a day would have cured. Today, treatments like that are within almost everyone's reach.

To me, that shows how special our time is. We discussed it for the rest of class, and interestingly, a lot of you leaned toward the less optimistic side.