We use the phrase ‘youthful optimism’ almost like a linguistic stopgap. It’s weight somewhere between ‘a fleeting thing to be desired’ and ‘a backhanded compliment reserved for when my juniors get out of line’.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase recently, since I started wondering where all the optimistic short science fiction I used to read, 5 or 6 years ago, went. There was Motherboard (nee Vice News) Terraform, which had spit out an enormous amount of great short scifi, along with thematically relavant art, every other week or so. There’s a few occasionally updated blogs (like compellingsciencefiction.com) and not much more that seems to have survived that ‘bubble’ of speculative and/or optimistic futurism that used to grace my RSS reader.

I wonder if it lines up with when Black Mirror was actually good, and not a punchline people use to describe the ‘technology but too much’ crowd.

Nowadays I spend more time reading blogs like 100R or lowtechmagazine, both of which are amazing projects that, while inspiring, are similar in that they have a grungy, survivalist vibe to them. Not in the Bear Grills way, more in the ecofuturist way, but with the threat of climate change coloring the lens, darkly.

At the end of this conversation unto myself, I started trying to plot out exactly when it was that I first read about the Deep Adaption paper and associated news. I realized that it was right after the supposed end of the SSF bubble I had thought existed, and then it hit me: While it may be true that a handful of blogs or projects had run their course, the real change had been in my desire to find that kind of fiction. I still think that there’s been a shift in the zeitgeist against the more optimistic threads of future-speculative literature, but I also think it’s been exaggerated to me personally by this ‘realization’ forecast in so much climate science literature.

Mind you, I don’t think anything I’ve mentioned is wrong, nor that we should downplay the damages of climate change in the hopes that something better will come along after, but I do think now that ‘youthful optimism’, or just enthusiasm for the future, is a skill worth maintaining and cultivating. We don’t get a say in aging, but we do get to choose the mindset we carry around all day with us.

If I’m wrong, future me will be able to read this and laugh at my ‘youthful optimism’ yet again. If I’m lucky, he won’t.