Optimism

I remember heading up the stairs at the Ace Hotel in New York City (one of the finer things about that fine city) and, stumbling – almost literally – over this:

I think I took a photo at the time but I can’t find it now. And this one is better anyhow. Turns out the staff at the Ace really like this idea, so much so that they also print it on the back of their keycards:

And they’re not alone: as tumblr proves. Artist Martin Creed has made a habit of constructing various signs saying just the same thing everywhere from Edinburgh to just a few blocks north of the Ace in Times Square.

And the affirmation remind us that, things now are as they should be, and the future will work out just fine.

What do we call this. In fact the definition of the work ‘optimism’ is a belief that the current state of affairs is the best it could be, and that the future will be too. And yet sometimes we fail to see this truth about now until it is later. It’s when we look back at our past that we can see what we should have perhaps valued more at the time.

Do our modern lifestyles make it easier or harder to be optimistic? I’m not necessarily contrasting optimism with pessimism (the belief that things are not as they should be and may not be in the future). What I’m contrasting it with is distraction. This dream that Steve Jobs et al have had – to put a computer in the hands of every man, woman and child, seems to rob us of our ability to understand where we are now. Everyday as I travel into work and back I see people staring endlessly at tiny iPhone screens, as disengaged with the real world as we could be. And most of the time, I’m one of them. Perhaps on occasion, what’s on the screen of the anonymous commuter is photos of family and friends from a million miles away via the miracle of  Facebook and the internet.

But a lot of the time it’s work email or Angry Birds.Why do we do this to ourselves? Why must we constantly stare at these alternative universes?

I suppose the answer is where we started out. That sometimes we do not wish to contemplate now, and prefer neither the past nor the future but some other timeless realm. It’s escapism, but often escaping to somewhere as uninspiring as a work email.

Still, the reassurance remains, everything will work out as it should, even if you’re reading this on the 5.27 to Sevenoaks.