In a world of rising uncertainty, optimism cannot be merely personal – it needs a collective effort. Sumit Paul-Choudhury, FRSA, author of The Bright Side, makes the argument for optimism, exploring how it can fuel resilience and yield better outcomes. From the famous Trans-Antarctic Shackleton expedition to today’s global challenges, collective optimism may be an overlooked key to creating meaningful change and fomenting trust.
Eight minutes
Collective optimism isn’t just about hope – it’s about believing we can tackle global challenges together. When we trust in each other’s ability to act, even the most challenging problems become opportunities for change, argues Sumit Paul-Choudhury
“It was a sickening sensation to feel the decks breaking up under one’s feet,” recounted Ernest Shackleton, “the great beams bending and then snapping with a noise like heavy gunfire.” After more than nine months stuck fast in the Antarctic ice, his expedition’s flagship, Endurance, had finally succumbed.
And so, on 27 October 1915, the great Anglo-Irish explorer reluctantly abandoned ship – leaving his crew stranded in perhaps the planet’s most hostile location, with only the supplies they’d salvaged from the wreck. Yet, 10 months later, Shackleton had led every one of his men to safety. They had voyaged in their tiny lifeboats to barren Elephant Island, where most of the crew remained, while a skeleton crew braved the raging Southern Ocean to seek assistance from a whaling station on South Georgia. Once there, Shackleton enlisted a ship and returned to rescue the castaways – but it took him five attempts.
Other polar expeditions, when they ran into similar difficulties, had collapsed into anarchy, their leaders deposed or even murdered, their supplies squandered and, eventually, their crew starved or frozen to death. Why didn’t Shackleton’s expedition succumb to this fate? He had a quixotic approach to picking crewmen, considering everything from sense of humour to physical appearance, but with one overarching concern: “The quality I look for most is optimism,” he said. “Especially optimism in the face of reverses and apparent defeat. Optimism is true moral courage.”
Left: John Vincent of Endurance mending a net, right: Chick of the wandering albatross*
There are many ways of considering optimism. In everyday use, we might think of it as a naive tendency to put the best possible spin on things. The more precise definitions used by psychologists describe it in terms of unreasonably positive expectations – expectations which cannot be justified based on the available evidence. As it turns out, such expectations are more like the default state of humanity than the exception – at least when it comes to our own lives. We expect good things to happen to us more often than the statistics, or our peers’ experience, suggest is plausible, and we expect bad things to happen less often.
This might seem counterintuitive: How can holding a mistaken belief be helpful? Sometimes, departing from reality in this way can indeed be problematic. Excessive optimism about specific risks – those of smoking, say, or gambling – can be associated with unhealthy or unwise behaviour. But a generally positive outlook is associated with longer lives, better health and greater success in life. That seems to be because optimists persist in seeking solutions to challenges even when they don’t know what those solutions might be – which also helps us to bounce back when we encounter a reverse or an apparent defeat.
It would seem that Shackleton knew what he was doing. At every stage of his troubled expedition, he reminded his men that, as long as they were alive, they had choices to make and options to explore. Not many of us will have our mettle tested as they did. But we all have our reckonings with adversities that make us reappraise how we expect the world to treat us. It’s at such times that optimism can be hardest to secure but also most valuable.
Above: Endurance under full sail, held up in the Weddell Sea*
There’s another lesson we can learn from the experience of Shackleton and his crew. Optimism is most often considered a personality trait, shaping how an individual thinks and behaves. But it also has a social dimension. We extend our optimism to those close to us: we also believe our family and friends will do better in life than the evidence or experience suggests is likely; and we can extend it to those who aren’t as close to us, but whom we consider to be likeable and capable.
That works both ways. If we exude optimism, people are more likely to want to hang out with us, whether socially or professionally: after all, would you rather live or work with someone who says things are looking up or someone who’s continually down in the dumps? The psychologist Suzanne Segerstrom argues that optimists’ attractiveness, coupled with their innate perseverance, makes them better at amassing social and economic power – and the more they do so, the more optimistic and attractive they become.
Politicians have long appreciated this: candidates for the presidency of the US, for example, have loudly proclaimed their optimism for decades, sometimes to good effect. “We choose to go to the Moon,” John F Kennedy told the American people in September 1962, when the US had only just put its first astronauts into orbit. That was an unreasonable expectation if ever there was one, but it was achieved, and the Apollo programme had the desired effect of boosting the nation’s collective spirits, at least for a time.
And optimism still holds its power. Donald Trump might have described his country as descending into chaos while campaigning, but his promise to voters was to ‘Make America Great Again’. The same is true for populists all over the world, who claim that their simplistic, often divisive policies will secure a brighter future. To the extent that they can maintain their followers’ belief, they’ll benefit from self-fulfilling prophecies. Even if they don’t change anything, people who had little reason to feel discontented in the first place will find it easy to declare themselves better off now.
Above: Endurance sinks slowly beneath the ice
Above: Crew members of Endurance
Shackleton’s men not only had to be optimistic about their chances of survival and eventual escape; they had to trust that their comrades would be similarly optimistic
Top: Relieving of marooned men by Chileantug Yelcho, below: Dog teams scouting a way to the land
But reality has a way of asserting itself. On Covid, climate, Brexit and more, such claims have proven to be not so much unrealistically as pathologically optimistic: the substitution of reality with wishful thinking and self-serving cant. And many of today’s challenges are collective action problems. We’d all be better off, for example, if we tackled the climate together: as rampaging wildfires in Los Angeles this January demonstrated, natural disasters care little for wealth or privilege. But such action is stymied by the actions of individuals pursuing just that wealth and privilege. To make a difference, we all have to act together, collectively and systemically.
That means being optimistic not just about own our actions, but about those of others. Shackleton’s men not only had to be optimistic about their chances of survival and escape; they had to trust that their comrades would be similarly optimistic, and thus also strive to seek out those possibilities – even when camped on the ice through the long Antarctic night, separated by hundreds of miles of stormy seas from those seeking succour on their behalf.
In this instance, collective optimism triumphed – but it is harder to secure. Once people become unknown to us personally, we become more primed to heed negative signals, whether that takes the form of alarming news or xenophobic fears. It’s hard to trust that others are doing the right thing when we can’t see into their hearts or minds. Rebuilding that trust may take new forms of democratic participation and new kinds of institutions. Citizens’ assemblies, for example, can help communities to find common cause and consensus; renewed localism in civics and governance could return much-needed agency and control to those they affect.
The philosopher Karl Popper echoed Shackleton’s sentiments when, in 1992, he said, “Optimism is a duty. The future is open. It is not predetermined. No one can predict it, except by chance. We all contribute to determining it by what we do. We are all equally responsible for its success.” Ultimately, we need to learn not to blindly follow the optimism of our self-declared leaders but to forge our own – and trust that others will forge it with us. We have to not only do the right thing, the optimistic thing, but act as if others will too.
You could say that we have to be optimistic about optimism.
This article is extracted and adapted from Paul-Choudhury’s book The Bright Side, an exploration of the psychology, philosophy and practice of optimism. Published in January 2025, this manifesto for optimism shows how, by embracing action, imagination and possibility, we can find a path to the bright side, even – perhaps especially – when the future seems dark.
Sumit Paul-Choudhury, FRSA, a former editor-in-chief of New Scientist, writes, thinks and dreams about science, technology and the future.
This article first appeared in RSA Journal Issue 1 2025.
* The collection of images presented here were taken by Frank Hurley, who was the official photographer on board Endurance. These 1915-1917 images showcase the very beginnings of colour photography
