Why I Am Still an Optimist a case for realistic optimism
If you read these newsletters regularly, you know I worry about debt, private credit and the bills we keep leaving for our children. I haven't changed my mind. But I don't believe the country is finished, and I don't want my warnings to leave that impression. I consider myself a realist. That ought to mean counting our strengths along with our liabilities.
A glass can be half empty and half full at the same time. Where we put our attention matters, especially if it affects whether we do anything about it. I choose to focus on what we can still build. There is quite a lot to work with.
ANOTHER WAY TO WATCH THE SAME COUNTRY
A recent New York Times essay found America's decline in The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. These are extraordinary shows, and they have plenty to say about greed, damaged institutions and the stories people tell themselves to keep behaving badly. I am not ready, though, to give Tony Soprano sole custody of the American character.
Watch This Is Us and you see a family trying, across generations, to love people it cannot entirely understand. Ted Lasso makes kindness interesting without pretending that winning no longer matters. In Shrinking, people carrying grief and making a mess of things still manage to help one another. Their decency is often awkward. That makes it recognizable.
Even Downton Abbey, beneath the rituals and the excellent tailoring, keeps finding occasions for loyalty and kindness to cross class lines. And Superman, for all the flying, keeps returning to a question we should ask of anyone with unusual power: what do you owe the people who don't have it?
None of this proves that America is healthy. It does suggest that we remain interested in goodness, and that goodness can make a compelling story. These characters have pride, blind spots and people they would rather avoid. They keep being asked to do better anyway. I think that is a fair description of the rest of us.
WHAT THE RESTRUCTURING ROOM TEACHES YOU
I spend my working life around troubled companies. Some have exhausted their options. Others still have a useful product and good people, buried under obligations the business can no longer support. By the time everyone is willing to acknowledge the problem, a great deal of energy has gone into explaining why it isn't really a problem.
Then comes the difficult meeting. What is the business actually worth? What can survive? Who will accept a loss? The answers can be painful. But there can also be relief in finally working with the same set of numbers. People can make decisions again.
That experience is part of what I am trying to explain in my new book The Long Postponement. Delay consumes choices. Honesty can preserve them. It cannot guarantee that a company will survive, but it gives the people involved a chance to save what is worth saving.
A country is more complicated than a company. Still, I recognize the habit of putting off an unwelcome conversation. I also recognize the possibility that opens when people finally have it. My optimism comes partly from knowing that a bad situation can contain more possibilities than anyone wants to admit.