And I mean in the more macro sense; it gets easier to understand the more immediately local and personal the issues get.
I’m also not doubting that there are plenty of people fighting hard against climate change and American tyranny and whatever else who would generally fit these labels. I just wonder what overcomes a basic belief in futility, especially for The Big Issues that have been plaguing humanity since the beginning.
Based on my personal experience, which may not be universal, is that most cynics/pessimists/nihilists are frustrated idealists who are a little tired and depressed right now.
On good days we get out and try harder.
I don’t know what does. To me, the big issues that are unsolved are generally political, because the political system is structured to be undefeatable. Living in a dictatorship, living in a plutocracy, climate change, universal health care, etc. People know that they really can’t change the political system so they eventually give up or look into moving abroad from what I’ve seen.
However the rage is always there, it just needs an outlet or a flashpoint. Once something happens that can act as a spark, all the repressed rage will come spilling out.
What motivates cynics/pessimists/nihilists to make improvements to the world?
Why do you think any of those people have any of those goals? I see little to zero evidence of it.
The cynics, the pessimists, and the nihilists mostly exist to cheerlead for inevitable disaster. It’s the non-cynics, the optimists, and the “everything matters” crowd who agitate for positive change. Often to little effect, but they are trying.
Turning the question around, what motivates optimists to seek out great successes? Even if they actually change the world, they still die in a hundred some-odd years and become an easily-missed sentence in some bored 5th grader’s textbook, and then later, a throwaway question in some late-night drunken trivia game.
Knowing that your life and impact are necessarily finite, and that the heat death of the universe is an eventuality, doesn’t necessarily mean that you just have to wallow up in a ball of self-pity and give up on everything. It just means you do what you can, and hope against hope that others will continue the work later.
Of all the well-intentioned activists, teachers, politicians, nonprofit workers, etc. that I’ve met (and there’s been a lot of them), I don’t think a single one was under the delusion that they could single-handedly fix the human condition and magically make life on earth all good. They were all quite pessimistic in their outlook (and this was long before Trump, even) because they generally understood humans and how the world worked.
But still, they were happy to work on their little slice of the world, making some immeasurably small contribution to their pet cause, because the alternative of doing nothing at all was even worse for their sanity. You could think of it as a form of escapism and self-delusion, perhaps. For one thing, that’s probably a survival trait we evolved with and can’t easily override, like an “idealistic treadmill”. Some people are just born or raised like that, I think, and it’s not an easy thing to turn off any more than selfishness and psychopathy can be easily turned off. The reward loop isn’t necessarily the hoped-for long-term outcome, just the day-to-day feeling of working on an impossibly hard problem. In that sense it’s not so different from elite athletes who train day in and day out with an infinitesimally small chance of actually winning first place. Sometimes the hard work with no guarantee (or even likelihood) of success is itself rewarding enough.
Anecdotally (only), not backed by any research but just the time I spent in such circles… I feel like it was more often the opposite, actually? The optimists were generally content in minding their own business and seeking hedonism and pleasure, reassured that the world was going to be OK regardless. It was usually the pessimists and cynics who thought “everything is broken and nothing is ever going to get better” — often with an unspoken “unless I try to do something about it, however small” — that tended to be there, putting in the grunt work day in and day out. The optimists might vote idealistically once in a while and donate money in a crisis, but it took the depressed realists to withstand the daily toil of working for a lost cause. Like worker ants, they’ve come to accept their fates and were happy to put in the work, I suppose.
Of course it’s not that binary, either. Burnout and lack of self-care were both huge issues in the nonprofit space, and sometimes people do tire of being cynical and hopeless all the time and either change their personality, or more often, change tracks to work on something else that they do have more immediate control over.
But I would say that, as a rule, there are far, FAR more pessimists working for those sorts of (progressive, pro-environment, leftist, humanist, etc.) causes than optimists.
I would also distinguish between pessimists who believe things are unlikely to get better, and nihilists who believe that nothing matters — the difference between “I’ll do what I can, even though I’ll most likely fail” and “Fuck it, I’m going to drink myself to death”. Of course there’s overlap and flip-flopping sometimes. Everyone has bad days where they think nothing matters anymore, but the life-long activist types have had to learn to live with persistent pessimism and still find small joys and celebrations here and there, I think.
Purely IMHO.
Speaking as something of a chronic pessimist, it’s a couple of things, mostly selfish.
I’d love to embrace the “frustrated idealist” title upthread (and that’s still a bit true), but it’s more self-centered than that.