Climate crisis, AI, inequality: What the world needs now is optimism

In January 1915, Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton led the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition toward the continent, only to be trapped in pack ice for more than nine months. He and his crew managed to escape in three lifeboats loaded with food and equipment, eventually reaching Elephant Island — with no way to contact the outside world and no certainty that anyone would come to their rescue. Yet Shackleton and every one of his men made it home safely ten months later. How did they survive conditions that would be nearly impossible to endure even today?

Sumit Paulchoudhury, a journalist and author with a background in astrophysics, argues in his new book "Hope Intelligence" that the answer is optimism. Shackleton deliberately selected optimistic people for his crew, and when he and a small group set off for the whaling station on South Georgia Island to fetch a rescue party, his deputy Frank Wild held the remaining men together through his own buoyant optimism, waiting steadfastly for his commander's return. Shackleton himself said at the time: "The quality I value above all others is optimism — optimism is true courage."

Optimists are often dismissed as naive or sheltered from hardship. But Paulchoudhury insists that "optimism is not necessarily the product of naivety." He describes it as "a resource we can draw on when things get hard — one that can even save our lives." The author, who lost his wife at a young age, says that without optimism he would still be shut away in a room, unable to move forward. Drawing on evolutionary biology, psychology, philosophy and history, he makes the case for why optimism is precisely what humanity needs in an era of compounding uncertainty — one defined by the climate crisis, inequality and economic anxiety.

According to Paulchoudhury, optimism is human nature. Error management theory, as described in evolutionary biology and neuroscience, holds that from prehistoric times onward, humans were better served by expecting a good outcome and acting on it than by hesitating in the face of uncertainty — and that this tendency shaped our evolution. Optimism, in other words, is not merely a personality trait or a preference; it is part of our nature. That inner disposition, he argues, extends outward into a conviction that the material, social and spiritual state of the world is consistently improving.

In practice, psychologist Neil Weinstein surveyed 130 Rutgers University students about the likelihood of various positive and negative life events — finding work, changing jobs, marriage, divorce, illness and the like — and found that students generally believed they were more likely than average to experience positive events and less likely than average to experience negative ones. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot, who has studied this "optimism bias" — the tendency for expectations to outrun reality — estimated that about 80 percent of people display it to some degree, while roughly 10 percent are realists who assess situations accurately and the remaining 10 percent are pessimists who expect the worst.

Of course, not everything can be viewed through an optimistic lens. Temperatures still climbing above 25 degrees Celsius in October and the rise of AI steadily displacing human roles are just two signs that the future is growing more uncertain in ways that have no historical precedent. People nod readily at bad news but demand evidence the moment a positive outlook is offered. Paulchoudhury argues that what is needed in precisely this kind of moment is "hope intelligence." There may be many reasons to despair about the future, he writes, but that despair must not be allowed to extinguish the will to change things. No one can predict outcomes or know the solutions in advance — yet optimism, he contends, is the force that keeps people trying to alter the result.

Blind optimism, however — the kind that minimizes danger and ignores inconvenient evidence — is itself dangerous. Paulchoudhury points to former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's early response to COVID-19 as an example of how a leader's uncritical optimism can slow crisis management and put lives at risk. What is needed, he explains, is not a belief that problems will resolve themselves, but a belief that we are capable of acting to resolve them: "rational optimism." Echoing Antonio Gramsci's formulation of "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," Paulchoudhury argues that the two must work together — an intellect willing to imagine the worst, paired with the conviction that obstacles can still be overcome. Rational optimism, as a posture of clear-eyed judgment that nonetheless keeps moving forward, is the virtue he believes humanity most urgently needs right now.

The best world that optimism can build is not a utopia from which all problems have vanished. It is a better world — one that people construct together within the constraints of reality. That requires watching for risks, revising plans as new information emerges and working with others, Paulchoudhury argues. The value of optimism lies not in being proved right about a positive outlook, but in what that expectation moves people to change. "The best of all possible worlds, the brightest of all possible futures, is in our hands," he writes. "All we need to do is imagine it, believe in it, and begin to build it."

Hope Intelligence / Sumit Paulchoudhury, translated by Kim Ha-hyeon / Wisdomhouse