Optimism: A Duty?

My TEDxKI talk, delivered at Karolinska Institutet on March 29, 2025

“It is our duty to keep joy alive.” That’s Tage Danielsson, the late Swedish author and comedian, who otherwise didn’t shy away from the tragic and absurd elements of the human condition.

You may ask how it’s even possible to be joyful or optimistic about the future, given the state of the world. But I’m here to tell you that Danielsson was right. A measure of optimism is not only possible – but something of a moral imperative.

I have myself changed my mind on this. I’m a Gen Xer. The standard joke, of course, is that nobody thinks about us. We were the latchkey kids, and so on. But if we’re known for anything, it’s for our cynicism and ironic detachment. And I’m perfectly fluent in ironic detachment.

But I changed my mind thanks to students I meet in my job as a university instructor. Most of them were born in this century, and so are part of a very different generation. When I and my colleagues talk about big challenges such as climate change, we’re dying to emphasize just how big the problem is – and how messed up we’ll be if we don’t fix it immediately. We’ve been conditioned by decades of climate skepticism. We’re frustrated by the lack of action, and feel an urge to emphasize the sheer size of the challenges and how dire our situation will be if we don’t act.

But my students tell me they’ve lived with an awareness of climate change their entire lives. They’ve never doubted the reality of it. For them, the question isn’t so much, “Is there a problem?” or “Did humans cause it?” but rather, “What are we supposed to do about it?”

Meanwhile, pessimism about the future is emerging as a major threat to public health, especially among young people. There’s an epidemic of climate anxiety – of people feeling depressed, dejected, demoralized, and helpless. Climate anxiety also comes with decision paralysis – an inability to take action.

In effect, then, we may have a situation where my community – responsible adults, scientists, and so on – discuss the immense challenges we’re facing in a way that risks making young people less likely to take action. To the extent that this is true, we have not only not become part of the solution – but part of the problem.

So, the question arises: Can we discuss these challenges without denying them but nonetheless inspire action instead of leaving people depressed, dejected, and paralyzed?

We can – and we must.

I’m a researcher too. And there’s inspiration to be found in a community of scholars who call themselves climate optimists, who talk about the climate crisis in a deliberately and thoughtfully optimistic manner.

Marcy Franck, who’s a science communicator at Harvard, puts it well. She writes: “The first thing I wish people understood about climate optimism is that it isn't about denying what we can see with our own eyes or ignoring our grief for what we’ve lost. It’s understanding that we know how to prevent things from getting worse, and we have a plan in place to be successful. Our challenge is to “yes, and” the crap out of otherwise conflicting thoughts.”

The point of this train of thought, as I understand it, is to think of optimism not as a free-floating feeling or naïve conviction that everything will be fine no matter. Because things won’t be fine no matter. Rather, she urges us to think of optimism as a judgment to the effect that things can get better – and a commitment to making sure that they do.

In this sense, optimism is not a feeling or emotion. It’s a judgment that can be rational, scientific, and evidence based.

There are in fact compelling reasons to believe that we can turn things around. Scientists have studied the major challenges for decades or centuries, and have developed solutions to them. There’s more agreement among scientists than you may think. And evidence suggests that people around us are more willing to act – even if that requires sacrifice. These solutions aren’t magical wands or silver bullets. (If you demand magic, I’ll direct you to the fiction isle.) Scientists can offer the next best thing: solutions based on evidence, which gives us reason to try and reason think they will work.

So optimism can be rational, scientific, and evidence based. It can also be radical. Just ask Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobile. About a year ago he gave a lecture at Davos where he said unfortunately there’s nothing we can do. In his words: “We’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions.” We had a window in the 1970s, allegedly, but that window is now closed. He also blamed the public for not caring enough. Why would Woods want us to be pessimists, and why is he talking about this now? The obvious hypothesis is that he’s worried we’re not pessimistic enough. Optimists are a threat to his business model, which is burning the hell out of fossil fuels until the end of the world.

Being optimistic – believing that things can get better – is a radical stance.

When I say that we ought to be optimistic in our discussions of major challenges, I’m not just speculating. There’s substantial research on how to talk about major problems, including climate change, in a way that encourages action rather than inaction. A notable study, conducted by a team of social psychologists led by Jay Van Bavel at NYU, was published approximately a year ago.

The scientists recruited hundreds of researchers and surveyed almost 60.000 people in 63 different countries. Each participant received plausibly motivational messages about climate change. The researchers tracked two key outcomes: whether people could be motivated to post about it on social media and whether they could be motivated to take action to mitigate the problem. In this study, participants were given the opportunity to take action in order to have trees planted in Africa.

One of the messages was called “doom and gloom.” This message conveys the reality of climate change, emphasizing its severity and the likelihood of further deterioration: “If your anxiety about climate change is dominated by fears of starving polar bears, glaciers melting, and sea levels rising, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a young adult today.” The message was designed to activate a fear response underscore the gravity of the situation. This message got people agitated. It increased the likelihood that they would share information about climate change on social media. However, when it came to taking concrete action against climate change, to plant trees in Africa, individuals who received the doom-and-gloom message were less inclined to take steps compared to those who received other messages.

Ironically, as I had suggested earlier, when talk about climate change by talking about the severity of the situation, without qualification, we may inadvertently discourage people from taking action.

This isn’t as perplexing as it sounds. Climate psychologists use the analogy of visiting a doctor for a heart condition. Imagine the doctor informing you that you have a heart condition, which could be potentially fatal. Imagine also that the doctor proceeds to say, again and again, just how deadly the condition is, and how likely you are to die from it. You would be horrified!

You do want the doctor to be honest about your condition. But when you’ve absorbed the information, you would much prefer the doctor to go on and say there’s good news: the outcome is not predetermined. The probabilities are under your control, and there are steps you can take to increase the likelihood of a positive outcome.

This approach is equally applicable to other pressing challenges. We must acknowledge the severity of these problems. But once the message has been conveyed, it’s futile at best and harmful at worst to continue to insist. Instead, we want to shift our focus to discussing solutions, which exist.

The problem with pessimism, then, is that it may compound the problem. I’m not telling anyone how to feel. I’m not telling anyone how to speak in the privacy of their own homes. I’m urging people to think about the way in which we talk in public – as responsible adults and sometimes scientists and experts – and what the consequences can be.

I’m a teacher and a researcher, but I’m a father as well. I have three young daughters and I know there will be a day when they ask me what I did in the face of climate change and all the other disasters. Here’s what will not cut it: “Well, I was very cynical about it. I posted many cynical messages on Facebook!” Here’s another thing that’s not going to cut it: “I told everyone things were going very badly and I accurately predicted what would happen.” They will not take that for an answer. Right? I need to act now in such a way that I can say honestly then that I did everything I could to keep hope alive.

If Tage Danielsson could find reason for optimism until the very last moment, so can we.

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This talk articulates the central theme in my book How Economics Can Save The World, which argues that social and behavioral science can be a powerful force for good, awakening the possibility of a happier, more just, and more sustainable world. I’m grateful to the people (too numerous to name) involved in making TEDxKI such an enjoyable and informative event.