On Cynicism and Hope

[naamah_darling]

In light of the great light bulb of "Goddamn, I wish I'd thought to say that!" which is currently blinking over my head, I would like to direct you to two posts that make a point I have been inarticulately trying articulate for a really long time.

First, coffeeem leads off with this entry, which explains that cynicism is not the same as wisdom or

Comments

[mayara13]

Hear, hear.

This election season, I've reached a breaking point with this. I've seen the question about whether it even really was possible that the Democratic nominee might win (when he was ahead in the polls) or it was just a polite fiction, along with a question about whether anything would really be better if he did win. In this particular person's defense, she is young, and I remember, as idealistic as I've always been, having found it quite tempting to be similarly cynical about people and the world -- but as you've mentioned, it doesn't fix anything.

As a result, I've also found it frustrating when my well-intentioned father (or my mother-in-law -- the two have much in common) says something about "[doing] what you have to do" in a context where, actually, no, you don't have to do that. This often happens in conversations about the idiots who go to Silicon Valley or the like and work 80-hour weeks with 1-2 hour commutes for pay that seems rather large until you take into account how expensive it is to live where they've chosen to live; no, it's not necessary to literally kill yourself working like that when you've got skills that are more in demand than there are people available with those skills -- something that the peasants were figuring out back in the Middle Ages after the Black Death wiped a bunch of them out, yet supposedly intelligent and educated folks these days can't figure out, and so they throw away things the labor movement fought to get for them.

Wow, I didn't mean for this to be a long comment.