22 Habits To Follow For A Happy Life - Kevin Kelly

(wind blowing) Your new book feels like it was purpose-written for me, massive fan of aphorisms, massive fan of pithy, short life advice. For the people that haven't read it, I notice a trend throughout the entire book, which is one of optimism and hope.

Mm-hmm.

And at the moment, I notice on the internet a, uh, current, um, rhythm of serious cynicism, people believing that the world can't improve, that the people who hope that it can are the ones that are genuinely the problem. What's the case for optimism? Why should people be optimistic at all?

I think there's, um, three reasons w- w- uh, why you should be optimistic as you possibly can, understanding that it's somewhat a temperament, but actually I think it is a skill. And, um, the first reason is, is that, um, if you read any history at all, you soon... A- and, and look at the evidence and the actual science, you have to conclude that progress is real and that the conditions that generated that progress are still working, at work in the world, and that this will statistically probability continue for a while. That's one reason. The second reason is that, um, we know from the wor- work of child psychologists that people who are optimistic thrive better. That... And that... And they, th- they, they understand, they, the psychologists understand that one of the ways you teach children is co-learned optimism, to be more optimistic is to have them come to understand that setbacks are only temporary. They're not... They're inevitable, but they're only temporary. And then the third reason is, is that, um, uh, it's the optimists who actually are creating all the cool things that we need and that there is making our lives better. All the, um... Optimist is someone who envisions a world or something that they wanna have and can believe, believes that it's possible, and that, that belief in that envisioning help make it come about, because the really good things that we want are so complicated, they're not gonna happen accidentally, inadvertently. You actually have to imagine them and have to believe that they're gonna happen. And that requires optimism, and that's why basically it's the optimists who are shaping our future.

How much do you think that people can nudge their disposition?

One of the easiest ways is to change your time horizon. If you look out beyond just next year or the year after, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, it becomes much easier to be optimistic because that, that slow growth, that slow compounding of progress can overwhelm even fairly serious setbacks and downturns and disasters even. And so, um, which are hard to kind of accept or even to, to confront with the short term, but if you take a longer term view, a long horizon, then, um, you have the ability to kind of see that they can be overcome, and that goes back then that the setbacks were just temporary.