I want to get back into the habit of writing things, and I also tend to bite off more than I can chew, so here’s a post I’ve wanted to write for a while that I’m going to try to keep short.

I’m fairly sure that if you were to ask someone in the street, they’d struggle to see optimism and utopianism as fundamentally different concepts. I think this hypothetical person is wrong: the two are opposites and I don’t believe it’s possible to be both at once.

Optimism is weak-willed and disappointing. It’s the thing you do when something goes wrong and you try to stop thinking about it. It’s looking away from that which is in front of your nose, trying - against all better judgement - to be happy in spite of what your gut is telling you. Optimism is a high that gets people killed and turns your neighbours into Nazis.

Utopianism, on the other hand, pairs quite beautifully with pessimism. To be utopian is to understand the contradiction at the heart of what you see before you. It is to find frustration at that which is obviously unjust or poorly constructed. It’s an acceptance of reality-as-it-stands, and a frustration - goddammit, a burning frustration - at the fact that the better world you know is possible refuses to be born. The most aggressively utopian people I know are also the most pessimistic, the most depressed, the most angry. They see with clear vision, without the wool pulled over their eyes. They know that this is not right, and they will never go Nazi.

It’s a difficult line to tread, when unholy horrors scream forth in all domains you care about; social, technological, environmental, political. How do you keep that utopian flame alight? I hope you find your own strategy, but for me, there’s only one way: lean into it. Do not allow those horrors to pry the fist-clenching pessimism from your hands. Become so utterly cantankerous as to make optimism impossible and utopianism inevitable.

After all; inside every pissed-off person is an idealist that knows what a better world looks like.