The healthy survival strategy in a world of shit isn’t to give up, it’s to fight on and hope for the best. It’s to come to the conclusion, that even though the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the fact that there are good intentions mean that the people actually wanted to succeed.
So while I’m very pessimistic, I’m also experienced enough to know that everyone is working for a better world.
In all my decades of working close to the political leadership and the top level decision makers, I can’t remember once meeting someone who wasn’t working for what they believed to be a better tomorrow. Maybe that’s a uniquely Danish trait, but I doubt it. What that good is, isn’t always what you or I would consider good, but my point is that even very evil decision makers are working for what they think is right.
The moment you become a cynic is the moment you lose your connection and with it, your ability to impact things. Because a manager who has the wrong view of your corporate culture, isn’t going to change unless you inspire them to be better and that applies to everyone.
Of course it’s hard to be optimistic as well. 98% or something like it of public IT system implementations fail to some extend, and if you expect them to succeed then I imagine it’ll be quite soul crushing. The key, to me at least, is to not let your pessimism turn into cynicism, because you don’t want to be the constant no-sayer either, you want to make your points and reservations clear, but then roll with the decision that gets made.
My inner cynic is howling at this statement.
For themselves.
That's a very cynical take.
The best survival strategy is to fight to improve your situation, not fight to change the world.
>The moment you become a cynic is the moment you lose your connection and with it, your ability to impact things. Because a manager who has the wrong view of your corporate culture, isn’t going to change unless you inspire them to be better and that applies to everyone.
Being realist or cynical would help you recognize the situation as it truly stands without looking at it through tainted glasses. It gives you more power, not less. Also, as a cynic, your goal won't be to inspire the manager to change, because that won't be a fight you are going to win. Your goal as a cynic would be to put yourself in a better position in that company.
As a cynic, I didn't try to fight the way things are laid in the company. The moment I found a position which seemed reasonably better at another company, I gave my resignation.
Individually, this is probably so. Collectively, it leads to the world becoming more and more shitty, year after year. It's a trap, and no one has figured out a way out.
I couldn’t disagree more. To me that is the lie that cynics fool themselves into believing is true.
I have no issue with the Socratic methodology, but the point of it is not to break the systems apart for the sake of finding flaws. It is to break them apart so that they can be reassembled better.
It’s that last part the modern cult of cynics forget too often in my experience. You’re not useful if all you can do is predict the doom and then say “I told you so” when you are proven right. Predicting where things will go wrong is easy, optimists do it as well, what sets them appear is that they try to move past their mistakes and learn for them.
To me no one is either an optimist or a cynic, labelling yourself as being only one is just too limiting, but in my anecdotal experience the people most likely to “make themselves” into just one category are the self-proclaimed realists.
Maybe my experience and opinions are wrong, but I have never come across such an individual who benefitted from their world view. At least no in the privileged world of Scandinavian software.
The cynic in me thinks that people who tend to rub shoulders with The Powerful tend to (for the most part) see them as well-intentioned (although perhaps flawed) people rather than to be critical of them. Because it’s better for your own self to have friends in high places than to truly look at what they do with dispassionate eyes.
I don’t even need to get into how The Powerful are viewed by most people (who are more of at a distance) who don’t have such incentives.
Arguably, the most visible ones are often very sincere - because otherwise they couldn't sustain the drive necessary to reach certain heights.
So you know them personally as well?
> Arguably, the most visible ones are often very sincere - because otherwise they couldn't sustain the drive necessary to reach certain heights.
Not in this very just world of ours, anyway.
There is a part of it about friendship, but it’s more because the world stops being black and white at those levels. Two politicians who come from the opposite sides will have more in common with each other than they will with any of the people who vote for them so it’s only natural that they remain faintly friendly with each other. They have to work together after all, as most things come down to compromises.
Others express their total disdain of even the concept of trust by jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon, or by believing TOR can do more for them than robust civil rights legislation. It’s all just aspects of the same sentiment, which is why there’s so much overlap.
Not at all. You are confusing coping mechanisms with (healthy) survival strategies.
In many societies the absence of empathy and mutual aid is one of the biggest contributors to unhappiness.
And it's not correlated with poverty.
(I'm not using the word "cynicism" because is very poorly defined and constantly misused in this thread.)
I guess the main thing here is to become aware through inspection of your current strategy and evaluate if it needs to be adjusted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation