optimism is not naive

possibility thinking in the real world

Jan 30, 2026

Sarah McBride, America’s highest-ranking openly transgender elected official, recently said:

You cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for hopelessness for an enslaved person in the 1850s, with no reason to believe that an Emancipation Proclamation was on the horizon.
You cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for hopelessness for an unemployed worker in the early days of the Great Depression who never heard of a New Deal.
And you cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for a closeted LGBTQ person in the 1950s who never knew of a country where they could live openly and authentically as themselves.
So yes, things are challenging. Things are scary. But the one thing we can’t give up is hope. And if every previous generation was able to summon their hope in the face of seemingly impossible odds, odds much greater than the odds we’re facing now, then surely so can we.

I have been critical of hope. I have called hope a four-letter word. But I want to take this opportunity to dig into what Representative McBride is really describing.

I think this isn’t really about hopelessness vs hopefulness. It’s actually about possibility-awareness vs possibility-blindness.

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The reframe

An enslaved person in the 1850s had every structural reason to believe slavery was permanent. And yet, change was possible. An unemployed worker in the Great Depression had no precedent for massive governmental intervention. And yet, transformation was possible. A closeted LGBTQ person in the 1950s lived in a world in which authentic expression seemed impossible. And yet, radical change was possible.

This is about the recognition that systems which appear immovable can move. It’s the awareness that multiple futures remain available even when one seems overwhelmingly likely.

When we think about that enslaved person in 1850s America, for them, an informed sense of possibility wouldn’t mean believing freedom was likely or even probable. It would mean recognizing that despite every structural force supporting slavery, (constitutional protections, Supreme Court rulings, economic dependency, political consensus) the system was not metaphysically permanent. It could change. Not that it would, but that it could.

This distinction matters enormously. True possibility thinking holds multiple futures simultaneously. It acknowledges that things could get worse while also recognizing that they could get better.

It doesn’t minimize the likelihood of bad outcomes, it just refuses to assign them 100% probability.

This space is better when more people speak up. You’re welcome to join the conversation, however big or small your thoughts feel.

The pessimist and the optimist

The person we call a pessimist has typically collapsed all possible futures into one: the negative outcome becomes not just likely but certain. This is its own form of naive thinking because it treats complex systems like they are deterministic.

The person we call an optimist (like McBride) has done something different: they’ve maintained awareness of multiple possible trajectories, including positive ones that seem unlikely but not impossible.

This explains why what looks like “hope” has been so essential to social movements.

Activists don’t believe victory is assured. Most of them are acutely aware of how they might lose, how they might be imprisoned, beaten, killed, or simply fail to achieve their goals. But they’ve identified a non-zero probability of success and they’ve decided that probability is worth organizing around.

The unemployed worker in the Great Depression didn’t need to believe the New Deal was coming. They needed to believe that some form of economic restructuring was possible, even if unlikely. They needed to believe that their organizing might influence whether it happened and what form it took.

In systems thinking, we call this a “strategic analysis of the leverage points within a system.“

The closeted LGBTQ person in the 1950s who got involved in early organizing wasn’t operating under the delusion that marriage equality was just around the corner. They recognized that the current state of affairs was contingent on social arrangement, not natural law. And if it was constructed, it could be deconstructed. The path was unclear, the outcome was uncertain, but the possibility existed.

The mathematics of possibility

When McBride contrasts past and present challenges, she’s not making an emotional appeal. She’s making a statistical observation about probability and possibility: possible does not equal probable.

Possibility awareness requires holding contradictions . You must simultaneously believe that:

Things could get much worse
Things could get significantly better
Which outcome occurs depends partly on factors beyond your control
Which outcome occurs also depends partly on your actions and the actions of others
You cannot know with certainty which outcome will occur
Therefore, acting as if positive change is possible is rational and logical, not naive.

This is cognitively demanding and it is decidedly easier to collapse into certainty: either “everything will be fine” (actual naive optimism) or “everything will be terrible” (pessimistic certainty.)

Both naive optimism and pessimistic certainty offer the comfort of resolution.

Possibility thinking, however, offers no such comfort. It demands you act without knowing whether your actions will matter, based solely on the knowledge that they might.

People often mistake this for blind faith. But in reality it’s the opposite. It’s acting despite full awareness that failure is possible, even likely.

What people call optimism is usually the refusal to collapse into certainty. It’s the depth and breadth of experience to acknowledge that the historical record of our universe clearly shows that unlikely positive outcomes have occurred before. And they may or may not occur again.

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A sense of possibility

The person with an informed sense of possibility doesn’t ignore the ways things could go wrong. They catalog those possibilities thoroughly. But they also catalog the ways things could go right, including the ways that seem improbable.

Then, they make a strategic choice about which possibilities to move toward and attend to, knowing that their actions and attentions shift probabilities without determining outcomes.

What I love about what Sarah McBride said is that it demonstrates a real-world sophisticated engagement with uncertainty. She illustrates that strategic awareness that multiple futures remain available IS the mechanism by which we navigate toward one future rather than another.

When she’s saying we can’t give up hope, what she really means is that we can’t give up our sense of possibility.

She’s asking for recognition that the future is not yet written. That historical changes have emerged from conditions far more adverse than ours.

That maintaining an awareness of positive possibility (alongside full awareness of negative possibility) is not only strategically necessary but intellectually honest.

FYI: I also write For People and Planet, a weekly newsletter about climate solutions and the creativity driving them. If you’re curious, you can check it out here: forpeopleandpla.net