Welcome—
I’m glad you are here, and thanks for taking a few minutes of your day to read this.
I want to start this re-launching of my bi-weekly newsletter with three questions:
How old are you in your head?
Do you think morality is on the decline?
Are you optimistic about the future?
Take a moment to really reflect on each of these three questions and answer them, even if it’s just scribbling them down with a pencil in your mind. We will come back to these shortly.
“All children are mystical. It is only as we grow old, not in body but in soul, that we lose this important ability. We forget. What we do not use, we lose.” — Luke Burgis
Oftentimes, when optimism comes up, people self-select into one of three categories. If it’s presented as a question, it sounds like this: “Are you more of an optimist or pessimist?” And typically people reveal themselves fairly quickly. “Oh, I’m an optimist—glass half full for me!” Or they might suggest, “Pessimist here. No one would be surprised I’m ‘glass half empty.’”
Nearly every time I’ve had this conversation with a group, at least one person (sometimes more) reject that binary and state with self-assurance: “I’m neither. I’m a realist.” As if having a positive or negative read on the future is somehow a sign of weakness or shallow thinking or naivete. “I call it like it is: neither positive nor negative, just see it what it is.” As if any of us can maintain such detached objectivity.
I wonder, as you’re reading this, if you’ve already self-sorted. Most likely. We like to define ourselves and others, to put labels on our ways of being. And I want to invite you to suspend those categories, just for a little while, as we get started here.
Possibilities
As this dispatch, Possibilitarian, begins anew, let me lay out very clearly where my belief rests:
I believe empathy and optimism are the two essential skills we need to teach and train in ourselves and in our relationships, in our communities and in society at large. Without them, we risk everything of value and importance to us.
To be a possibilitarian is to be understanding of and optimistic about the future.
To be a possibilitarian is to at least seek out the intentional use of the skills of empathy and optimism to remain open to and in pursuit of generative possibilities in our individual and shared futures.
A possibilitarian pursuit is relevant for personal relationships, for community building, for ending racial injustice, for overcoming the climate crisis. It’s relevant for choosing a career path, for saving up to buy a house, for deciding which school to send your kids to. It is relevant and necessary for the particular and the universal, for the individual and the collective.
In some ways, to be a possibilitarian is to embrace paradox—to see the gaps and believe they can be overcome. To see the brokenness and believe in their healing. To embrace loss and invest in renewal. To understand that everything belongs in our stories and is part of the universal pattern of order, disorder, reorder—the pattern of life, death, and rebirth.
If you’ve been a reader here for a while, bear with me as I reiterate some key definitions and perspectives that are foundational to the future of what I’ll write here. It’s important as we get started to have some shared definitions, to have clarity where assumptions may otherwise derail.
Empathy
I put empathy at the top of my list of skills I think everyone should develop and employ in the everyday. It’s a subject and skill I’ve been studying for quite some time now, both in grad school research and for personal growth.
Here’s my definition of empathy: understanding without judgment.
In the research, you’ll find a plethora of definitions. That’s because empathy is a relatively new concept in the world of psychology, and therefore relatively new in the lexicon of the average person. One meta-study on empathy came to conclude there are four essential components across the landscape of research to date:
Understanding what someone thinks
Understanding what someone feels
Communicating an accurate understanding to that person
Withholding judgment
That last bit’s the toughest, in my experience. And “understanding,” in my definition and theirs, belies just how expansive the process, skillfulness, and depth of “understanding” goes. We’ll explore that more as time goes on.
When we can truly seek out understanding of the perspective and experiences of another person (or even ourselves), resisting the temptation to judge or “should” or dismiss or belittle, we create connections and new possibilities.
In late 2017, I wrote a post on empathy as the way to move forward with healing (first on Medium, then moved over to Substack in 2022), processing the turmoil that many felt in the early years of the Trump administration.
Empathy says “That must really hurt…” instead of “It’s not as bad as you think.”
Empathy says “Tell me more about it…” instead of “Here’s what you should do.”
Empathy says “It sounds like you’re in a hard place right now…” instead of “Everything happens for a reason.”
Empathy is the fuel on which meaningful relationships run. It’s the only way connection is possible. But it’s not enough to empathize with those who are close to you or like you. That’s not really empathy as much as it is self-consolation. Empathy needs to stretch across artificial borders.
You can read the full post here in the link below. I still hold that empathy is fundamentally how we need to move forward in virtually every aspect of our shared lives.
Optimism
Quickly rising in importance in recent years for me personally, optimism is a little older, a little more clearly developed in research than empathy. But it’s equally perceived with empathy as an “either you have it or you don’t” ability. But neither is true. Empathy and optimism are both teachable and trainable.
Here’s my definition of optimism: choosing to find possibility in an unknown future.
Optimism isn’t a certainty of good things to come. It’s not general positivity. It’s a behavior and a mindset, a posture and an intention.
“Choosing” means it is something active, not passive. “Find possibilities” requires a sense of faith in what isn’t seen or provable. Maybe it even means some things can’t be possibilities until we consider them. “Unknown future” acknowledges uncertainty (and hardship) that is always lurking.
An even more specific version of optimism, “tragic optimism,” was described by Viktor Frankl. Not only a psychologist but also a survivor of Nazi concentration camps during World War II, Frankl wrote Man’s Search For Meaning, a powerful reflection on suffering, meaning, and purpose.
“...saying yes to life in spite of everything,” presupposes that life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable. And this in turn presupposes the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive or constructive….hence the reason I speak of a tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for:
(1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment;
(2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and
(3) deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.
This version of optimism is grounded, it is realistic, it is sober. And it still seeks out and assumes there are possibilities worth pursuing. Perhaps more than anything else, “tragic optimism” informs my understanding of what it means to be possibilitarian.
Back to the three questions we began with:
How old are you in your head?
Your answer might suggest a kind of optimism you hold about yourself and life itself you are unaware of.
The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are
“‘How old do you feel?’ is an altogether different question from “How old are you in your head?” The most inspired paper I read about subjective age, from 2006, asked this of its 1,470 participants—in a Danish population (Denmark being the kind of place where studies like these would happen)—and what the two authors discovered is that adults over 40 perceive themselves to be, on average, about 20 percent younger than their actual age.”
Do you think morality is on the decline?
The consensus is most people think so, and have thought so for a long time, despite evidence to the contrary. This may point to a kind of cognitive bias inherent in humans that makes being a possibilitarian like swimming upstream. (That makes considering optimism all the more important, in my opinion.)
Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse
“When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.”
Are you optimistic about the future?
Let’s see what a valid scientific assessment says. Click this link and take what is called the “Life Orientation Test-Revised.” It’s just ten quick statements.
Remember, you aren’t your assessment results and, as I’ve started to make the case, optimism is teachable and trainable. More than anything, just be curious about your results and reflect on how your life experiences or genetic makeup may be shaping how you view and interact with the world.
In coming posts, we will swim into deeper explorations of what it means to be possibilitarian.
We will talk, yes, about empathy and optimism, but also meaning and purpose. I will share stories of people finding possibilities, consider questions people are holding on to about their meaning and purpose, and reflect on what it’s like to be in the middle of a story where the possibilities have yet to be defined.
There is no magic solution here, no easy button. The perfect practice of a possibilitarian life is contrary to the entire definition and mindset. You can’t perfectly know and prepare for the future—but we can stay open to the possibilities, imperfectly and graciously.
I am optimistic about the future, though with no certainty as to what it might hold. Let’s go there together.
To Check Out
In this section, you can expect to find articles, news, movies, podcasts, and more—anything I’d recommend you, well, check out.
‘Oppenheimer’ stirs up conflicted history for Los Alamos and New Mexico downwinders (AP News)
I saw the movie (loved it, more to come) and it’s important to hear voices speaking out about the more complete history the movie doesn’t cover.
The Fellowship of the Tree Rings (Radiolab)
“With help from pirates, astronomers and an 80-year-old bartender, this episode will change the way you look at the sun. (Warning: Do not look at the sun.)”
The Finnish Secret to Happiness? Knowing When You Have Enough (The New York Times)
“The Nordic nation has been ranked the happiest country on earth for six consecutive years. But when you talk to individual Finns, the reality is a bit more complicated.”
Acting Out (Revisionist History)
“The forgotten origins of a major social science, the missing chapter in Ella Fitzgerald’s life, and what it all has to do with the prison just down the street from Malcolm’s office.”
Still (Apple TV+)
I finally had the chance to watch this look at Michael J. Fox’s life and journey with Parkinson’s disease. It wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, but as someone who grew up on his movies (well, at least BTTF), it was fun to hear stories and moving to hear him talk about his perspective on living with this debilitating disease.
Connections (NYTimes game)
The New York Times clearly is still trying to find the next Wordle. And I’m a sucker for word games. So I’m playing it daily right now.
This dispatch was written to music, including the 2023 album, Outside Problems, by Andrew Bird.