Is Optimism Dead?
What happens when yesterday seems better than tomorrow?
Perhaps it’s years of direct exposure to Los Angeles and its endless supply of sunny days. Perhaps it’s my dad, an old school surfer who always thinks a better set of waves is just beyond the horizon line.
I live every day with the belief that tomorrow will be exponentially better than yesterday. This makes Standard Time a comforting home. We are of the belief that in a world and industry where uncertainty is the only certain, we have to be malleable, forward-looking and above all, optimistic.
It’s a quality that we believe is valuable and underrated in advertising. Cynicism can be the enemy of creativity and reinvention. It’s also a cousin of fear, which leads to stagnancy and repetition, probably the worst traits of any content.
You often hear creatives complaining that they’ve sliced a brief every which way and there’s nowhere left to go. It’s often during this time that they go a safe route, which usually means doing something that’s already been done. We as creatives have to become smarter at presenting and communicating new ideas to our clients. Optimism may seem like relying on wishes and hopes to solve this problem, but believing there’s a better idea out there can motivate creativity and will these ideas to exist. If you bang your head against the wall hard enough, you might just break through.
Optimism is also a trait that, frankly, more clients could stand to adopt. Rather than trying to rekindle past successes or looking to the numbers, optimism can be a guiding light to take bigger risks and be proactive rather than reactive. Sure, not all ideas will work out, but an ambitious failure with good intentions is always more interesting than by-the-book mediocrity.
Obama was really the poster child for optimism. Probably the finest motivational speaker of the past 100 years, he was able to build an impossible bridge between soaring dream rhetoric and hard work drive. He believed that the dreams we all shared were and are possible, but we actually have to work for them. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” is the nicest, most optimistic version of “do it yourself, lazy fuck.”
Which brings me to the reason for this article, the impending Trump era. The concept of “Tomorrow,” which used to fill me with anticipation and exhilaration, is now a scary prospect. We are leaving our era of proactive, forward-thinking change and giving over to regressive, reactive, racist backtracking. Nostalgia is the dark cousin to optimism, playing on the same hopes and ambitions but instead moving us in reverse rather than ahead. These first weeks of the Trump era are the first time I’ve felt like the future will not be the one I had imagined.
But maybe that’s OK. Life and creativity is a constant test of our ability to problem solve. I think of that wise sage Barack Obama: “It’s not the end of the world, until it’s the end of the world.” Optimism will never actually die. We fight, we march, we create, we inspire and we move our economy forward.
Creativity and optimism remain a guiding light in our industry and many others. Tomorrow can be better. There’s always another set of waves coming.
