Optimisim—"best of all possible worlds"
Having a baby, or rather, observing your baby discover the world meticulously and slowly through an unyielding trial-and-error makes way for an optimism and reassurance that a better life is possible. Anything is possible, still.
I have never been optimistic until I had my son. He is optimistic; he doesn't know any other way. He keeps trying until he achieves what he needs to. Sometimes it takes a while—his days are like my years—but he eventually walks, puts his hat on so it stays on, aims inside the pot of parsley with his watering can, because he never stops trying.
How can I not be optimistic when I have a whole world to discover through and alongside, what Maria Montessori calls, his unconscious absorbent mind.
I imagine a life of joy and success in ways that are regularly precluded by my habitus—my cruel optimism.
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. These kinds of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.
All attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.
But optimism might not feel optimistic. Because optimism is ambitious, at any moment it might feel like anything, including nothing: dread, anxiety, hunger, curiosity, the whole gamut from the sly neutrality of browsing the aisles to excitement at the prospect of"the change that's gonna come." Or, the change that is not going to come: one of optimism's ordinary pleasures is to induce conventionality, that place where appetites find a shape in the predictable comforts of the good-life genres that a person or a world has seen fit to formulate. But optimism doesn't just manifest an aim to become stupid or simple-often the risk of attachment taken in its throes manifests an intelligence beyond rational calculation.
Whatever the experience of optimism is in particular, then, the affective structure of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way.
But, again, optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.
—Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (emphasis mine)