“I became an optimist the night my wife died.” So begins Sumit Paul-Choudhury’s new book The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World. It’s a bold opening; how might a person confronting their partner’s death simultaneously retain a sense of hope? Despite his grief, Paul-Choudhury felt confident that “better times lay ahead – if only I worked at them”.
The “work” aspect of this sentence is fundamental to Paul-Choudhury’s entire thesis on optimism. As an astrophysicist and former editor of New Scientist, he prided himself on being “a hardened critical thinker, committed to solid evidence and rational argument”. The realisation that he had “chosen to identify as an optimist” left him feeling perplexed. His initial impression of optimism was that it “amounted to nothing more than a belief” and that investing too heavily in it was “fundamentally silly and potentially irresponsible”. But he eventually concluded that it seemed like the only way forward.
Optimism is often unfairly dismissed as naive or divorced from reality. Freud set the prevailing tone on the issue in the first half of the 20th century, suggesting that those who persisted in clinging to “irrational beliefs” were “delusional” and potentially in need of “psychiatric treatment”. The word itself has much loftier origins, however, dating back to Enlightenment polymath Leibniz’s philosophising about God and the problem of evil. His theory of one “optimal” way to make a world led its adherents to be known as optimists. In the 21st century, Paul-Choudhury interprets this to make “the best of all possible worlds” a statement of aspiration, not belief, and one in which we all have a contributing role.
It’s unsurprising that existing data suggests a strong association between optimism and well-being. Research indicates that higher levels of optimism have been linked with everything from better sleep quality to fewer heart and cholesterol problems. Optimists have also been found to cope better with stress, pain, cancer and infertility. “Overall, the conclusion is that optimists tend to enjoy longer, happier and healthier lives,” writes Paul-Choudhury. Surely, then, it’s in our interest to devote some time to cultivating this quality?
It’s worth noting that The Bright Side is about as far from a pop-psychology book as you can imagine. It takes in Greek myths, 18th century philosophy, cosmology, geoengineering and even “terror management theory”. It’s a book that avoids easy answers – yet I’m still compelled to ask how one might go about developing this elusive trait.
“The research doesn’t really show convincing evidence for how you can go about making yourself more optimistic,” Paul-Choudhury tells me. “I don’t think it’s particularly easy or quick to change your default level of optimism, but I think you can take the optimistic capacity that you do have – that most of us have when we’re mentally healthy – and apply it to the challenge at hand. And that’s where our intellect comes in. We’re not just intuitive creatures – we can think about things in a deliberate way.”
Despite this somewhat disheartening response, Paul-Choudhury references several techniques in the book that offer some hope. Error management theory, for example, suggests that it can be better to take action even when your best estimate of success is fairly low. It argues that participating means benefiting from opportunities that you may not have realised even existed. It’s the stuff of cliche, he writes: “Eighty per cent of success is just showing up. You miss every shot you don’t take.” With new opportunities comes the potential for your optimism to grow.
Secondly, disputation. This theory, developed by the “so-called father of positive psychology” Martin Seligman, involves challenging your pessimistic thoughts when they arise. He suggests beginning with one week of disputing attentively: “When you hear the negative beliefs, dispute them,” he says. “Beat them into the ground.” But Paul-Choudhury describes this as “a variation on cognitive behaviour therapy” that could veer closely to toxic positivity. “Failing to see the downside of your actions, refusing to accept the reality of other people’s problems, believing that a positive attitude is mandatory: these are all to be avoided,” he writes. He cites former prime minister Boris Johnson’s “blind optimism” during the pandemic as a warning, stating that those cushioned by wealth and privilege may “ignore or stymie remedies for injustice or misfortune, even as they rationalise those injustices and misfortunes as simply the way of the world”.
The “best possible self” or BPS exercise is “a more plausible contender” towards developing long-term optimism, continues Paul-Choudhury. This involves spending 15 minutes each day writing about the version of yourself in a future where everything has gone right. “All your efforts have paid off and you have accomplished everything you ever wanted to,” he writes. “Then you spend five minutes imagining that future.”
To me, this sounds suspiciously like manifesting, a concept that has grown in popularity in recent years, with everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Drake evangelising about how simply wishing hard enough makes something happen. But Paul-Choudhury disagrees. “Manifesting is a nebulous practice to begin with,” he says. “The kind of phrases like ‘the universe will provide’… it’s the idea that you don’t have to do anything – that you simply visualise something and things will fall into place to your benefit.
“I think the BPS gives you clarity about what it is you want and starts you thinking about how you might get there,” he continues. “It’s giving yourself a bit of time, which we don’t necessarily do very often, to think about who our future self might be and what they might want. At the simplest level, I think it’s whether you think you have to work towards that or if you think that the universe is going to sort itself out if only you wish hard enough.”
Optimism can feel hard in a world seemingly full of conflict, injustice, socioeconomic inequality and a climate crisis. Many people feel hopeless and pessimistic about the future of humanity, despite the fact that things have been gradually improving for most people on significant metrics, such as child mortality, poverty and healthcare, for many years now. In fact, a major 2016 survey of over 18,000 people conducted by YouGov shows that only 4 per cent of Britons think the world is getting better.
While it’s undoubtedly important to be aware of the threats our planet faces, Paul-Choudhury questions whether doom-mongering is the most effective way to initiate change. He cites Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam’s alarming 2019 manifesto titled Advice to Young People as you Face Annihilation in which he envisaged a societal breakdown prompted by the climate crisis. While the environmental movement has since distanced itself from the controversial figure, there are many other people keen to prophesize about society’s imminent downfall.
“Hallam and other prophets of doom claim to be speaking a truth that no one else will – not politicians, not the media, not even other environmentalists or climate scientists, for reasons of dishonesty, cowardice or venality,” writes Paul-Choudhury. Rather than inciting people to action, it’s a position that incites paralysis, he argues. “When you put things like that out there into the public domain, it just gives people a reason to either agree with you and say ‘we’re doomed’ or disagree and dismiss it as lunatic scaremongering,” he tells me. “Either way, it doesn’t lead to constructive action.”
He’s also concerned about the way we convey information about our world to children and young people and how this may push them towards pessimism. “I don’t think that’s a new problem,” he says. Growing up in the 1980s, he writes about feeling “terrified” of the threat of nuclear war. “ Maybe it’s just part of growing up, but I am concerned that in our bid to explain to young people what the state of the world is we’re not giving them a perspective that makes them feel agency or control or capacity,” he says. The young need reassurance that the future is within their grasp, he writes. Finding these solutions will take “ingenuity, effort and the willingness to look for them – even if we don’t know at the outset what they are, or where to find them”.
And it’s collective action, effort and optimism that is the only feasible way forward in creating a better world, he says. Instead of trying to understand optimism, we simply need to start getting on with the task at hand using our collective skills, knowledge and judgement. “We have to believe in better, together,” he writes.
Pessimism is a luxury we can seldom afford. Our future may be uncertain – and it will undoubtedly look different compared with 50 years ago – but it’s a future Paul-Choudhury argues we must approach with optimism. It is optimism that acknowledges that some of these unknowns are positive and encourages us to seek them out, he writes. “If, on the other hand, we have no expectation that our lot in life can be improved, we have no motivation to put in the thought and effort needed to improve it and those solutions go undiscovered. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
He cites Karl Popper who describes optimism as “a duty – we are all equally responsible for its success”. Christiana Figueres, the diplomat who led the breakthrough 2015 Paris Agreement on climate, speaks of “stubborn optimism”, arguing “we don’t have the right to give up or let up”. Here, optimism is akin to a moral obligation, a social justice movement. It’s a compelling argument.
For Paul-Choudhury, all the versions of optimism he discusses in The Bright Side – psychological, philosophical, practical – come down to opening us up to possibility, “a willingness to accept that the path ahead of us is not the only one that exists”, he says. “The pressures of life, the saturation of news, the sense that you can’t really achieve anything because you’re just one person – it’s easy to fall into a way of thinking where there isn’t any new way of doing things,” he says. “But we must experiment and we must try.”
Rather than “the passivity of realism”, it’s optimism in the face of uncertainty that is the true moral courage, he writes. “We’re born optimistic. Some of us stay that way. If we get lost, we should try to make our way back.”
‘The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World‘ by Sumit Paul-Choudhury is available to buy now
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