Hopeful Thinking: How Simple Optimism Can Ensure A Better Future

Communities across our country are riddled with holes: empty store fronts that are peepholes through which you can see a once thriving business destination.  When I see these vacant spaces, I get depressed.  And we all probably (understandably) get depressed thinking about the tough economic times we face.  Thankfully, we may be genetically inclined to hope for a better future, hopeful thinking which in turn can have realistic benefits for our community.

Tali Sharot, neuroscientist and author of the new book The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, argues that we are more optimistic (even if irrational) than we are realistic.  What Sharot calls the “Optimism Bias” is our cognitive predisposition to believe that the future will be better than the past or the present.  We are more likely to see the glass half full.

Sharot believes the optimism bias protects and inspires us.  “To make progress,” Sharot writes in a May 28, 2011 Time article, “we need to be able to imagine alternative realities — better ones — and we need to believe that we can achieve them. Such faith helps motivate us to pursue our goals.”  In fact, Sharot argues that without this bias our ancestors may not have taken the risks necessary to carry civilization forward. 

More importantly than the bias itself, is the potential for the bias to improve our reality.  In the same Time article, Sharot explains that our hopeful expectations “become self-fulfilling by altering our performance and actions, which ultimately affects what happens in the future.”  Put another way, our actual future depends on our hopes for the future.

For our local communities, this means that our personal individual psychological expectations – even if seemingly irrational and lofty optimistic ones – have realistic actual consequences for our community.  If we imagine our communities’ downtown thriving, we are more likely to fulfill that vision by shopping there instead of, say, on Amazon.com.  Likewise, if we imagine our own children receiving a diverse and rewarding education, then we are more likely to vote to increase funding for free education for all.  Or if we imagine less traffic, we may very well find ourselves taking public transit more frequently.

 

Staying hopeful is not always easy.  But doing so will have a real impact on the future in which we live.  Our realized community will only be as great as the one we can realize.

Our Education

As many high school students across the country receive their diplomas, we can debate whether our education system has provided the best education possible.  But as valuable as formalized education is, we cannot discount the tremendous value of self-education.

Having the initiative to educate oneself is, in many important ways, a paramount duty.  Henry Adams, in his The Education of Henry Adams, argues that where traditional and organized education fails us, our capacity for self-education does not.  Reading, having new experiences, and holding friendships above all else is, in Adams’ mind, the true path to enlightenment. 

In The Education Adams speaks of the people in his life as having “values only as educators” and his surroundings being important “only so far as they affect education.” Adams emphasizes that how we remember our experiences is often more important than the experience itself.  He delves deep into self exploration and resurfaces with the realization that it is the life lessons he chooses for himself that ultimately mean the most. 

We learn from reading The Education that formalized education can in some ways stifle, instead of foster, educational growth.  The habits imposed by institutional structures can place a detrimental emphasis on arbitrary academic achievement instead of moral attainment and personal integrity.  The conclusion from The Education is that there is profound and sometimes life changing value in an ambition to educate oneself.  Self-education is valuable education.

The influential psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (whose name I’m sure you can’t say three times fast) explains in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience that people who consistently report living happy and satisfied lives are people who, among other things, “keep on learning until the day they die.”  

Csikszentmihalyi provides an example in Flow of how personal objectives can be a catalyst for attaining private wisdom:  “Again the importance of personally taking control of the direction of learning from the very first steps cannot be stressed enough.  If a person feels coerced to read a certain book, to follow a given course because that is supposed to be the way to do it, learning will go against the grain.  But if the decision is to take that same route because of an inner feeling of rightness, the learning will be relatively effortless and enjoyable.” 

I am by no means encouraging high school grads to tear up their college acceptance letters.  In fact, I am an attorney with many years of higher education under my belt and so I personally owe much to formalized education. 

I mean, however, to highlight the importance of our self-directed educational pursuits in the fulfillment of our lives.  Picking up a book to read what interests you personally or writing a letter to the editor on a topic that motivates you, for example, is also an education.

Self-education, whether we are college-bound high school grads or adults well beyond the days of standardized tests, is as important as the value we receive from our formal degrees.  We should cultivate our own educational well-roundedness as a means of enriching our own cultural identity.  Step outside students: Class is in session.

Are We Still Here

It’s not always clear when I’m in my own city and when I’m not.  On my way home from work, or out and about with my wife and daughter, I find myself skirting the city limits and I often wonder, “am I still in my city?”

This question makes me think about an engaging problem in modern philosophy known as The Problem of the Many.  The problem poses the following question: how do you define an object that does not have clearly distinguished borders?  How do you define fuzzy things? 

In his 1993 essay “Many, but Almost One,” the philosopher David Lewis uses a cloud as an illustrative means of presenting the puzzle.  Think of a cloud, Lewis instructs.  From the ground, the cloud appears to be one object with a clear, outlined boundary.  On closer inspection, however, the cloud is a mere collection of many individual water droplets; its edges are vague, indistinguishable and not as apparent (if at all obvious) as you at first concluded.  

Now, imagine – hovering there in midair – that you flick one water droplet from the cloud’s edge down to earth.  Without that single drop of water, are you left with the same cloud?  Flick away another droplet.  Still the same cloud?  Do this again and again (and again…) until eventually you are left with a single water droplet: is that single droplet the same cloud?  If it is, were you in fact gazing up from the ground at many small clouds and not just the one you thought?  And if not, at which point did the one cloud cease being what you thought was a single object drifting through the sky? 

Western Washington University’s philosophy professor Hud Hudson surveys many attempts to answer The Problem of the Many with wonderful clarity in his book A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person.  Hudson, however, applies the problem to human persons. How do we identify the “person,” Hudson inquires, among the world’s fuzzy material pieces?  Greater than the solutions to the puzzle Hudson presents is his ability to persuade us that The Problem of the Many is a problem that needs an answer.  We need to know who we are.   

The Problem of the Many aptly applies to the way we understand our community.  How do we define the community in which we live?  An easy answer lies on a city map.  That answer, however, is not very meaningful (or interesting for that matter).  Rather, the bigger question that is filled with meaning is how do we define the rich sense of community that we think of as our town? 

In Hudson’s words, there are “Many Problematic Solutions to the Problem of the Many.”  But simply thinking about the issues it poses – regardless of the ultimate answers reached – reveals deeper truths about how we define our community and how we live in it.  Understanding the characteristics of our community enables us to salvage essential aspects of the community that might otherwise fade without our noticing. Likewise, we can nourish those fledgling features of our growing community that promise to define, for the better, our communities of tomorrow. Either way, just asking the question, “where are the margins of our community?,” keeps us from falling off its edge.