Lately I’ve been circling around morality and I keep ending up at the same dead-end: The world appears to be immoral by design, and my better instincts are starting to feel outgunned. Cynicism has started looking like a kind of ancient wisdom that promises insulation from the outside world. If I expect less of it, it’ll hurt me less.
I didn’t like sitting with that feeling, so this week I’ve decided to poke it where it hurts. Not to punish myself, but to ask whether the seemingly clever existential armour of cynicism might actually be a trap.
Hope, before it goes extinct, deserves a fair hearing. Not as a cloying sort of cheerfulness, but as the stubborn belief that our own agency still matters.
When Did Cynicism Become A Survival Strategy?
There is a brutally simple answer to this: it’s safer. If you never let your guard down, you can’t be caught unaware by something as unreliable as hope. “Expect disappointment,” we parrot to ourselves, “and you’ll never be disappointed.” That mantra hasn’t just appeared from nowhere; it’s a survival tactic we’ve learned across our history.
Over the last half a century, public faith in the institutions that were supposed to hold the centre has plummeted. Here in the UK, everywhere you look seems rotten. From the Partygate and PPE contracts scandals during the COVID-19 crisis, to ongoing mortgage chaos that feels like some sort of cosmic prank. Trust in Parliament and political parties are sitting near historic lows, and faith in our press isn’t much better. A 2023 YouGov survey found that fewer than one in ten of us UK citizens said they trust journalists to tell the truth.
It’s the same story elsewhere too. In the United States, confidence in the federal government has fallen from around 75% in the 1960s to just 20% today (Pew research, 2024). Global polls show a similar cynicism enveloping Europe, South America and parts of Asia; a long tail of scandals, inequality and algorithmic outrage. The pattern is familiar across the globe: People no longer believe the system works for them, only on them. When the world keeps proving your doubts right, mistrust starts to feel like maturity.
This is the social landscape we’re all sat in currently. Every headline feels like proof that someone, somewhere is taking the piss, so there is little wonder that cynicism has stopped being rebellion but instead starting to feel like common sense. We’ve collectively started to put our hands in our pockets, and keep our hearts out of reach.
The scaffolding of trust is collapsing everywhere you look, so self-protection has become the only rational architecture that we have left. We stop expecting competence or decency, because disbelief feels like a shield, and because somewhere along the way we’ve learned that suspicion feels a lot like intelligence.
We’ve evolved with a negativity bias, an attentional tilt to weigh threats heavier than possibilities. Evolutionarily, false positives (such as “hey that rustling grass could be a tiger”) kept us safer than false negatives. Cynicism is just the psychological upgrade of that bias, an emotional armour that says “if we assume the worst we’ll stay alive.” When we see the world this way, cynicism isn’t some sort of moral failure, it’s essentially risk management.
But armour is heavy and always limits your movement. This same posture that protects us from disappointment also blocks surprise, connection, even the willingness to try again. If we never bet, you can’t lose. But you also can’t win. The question isn’t whether cynicism once kept us safe, because it did. The question is whether wearing it all the time is starting to numb the very capacities (attention, care, courage) that make change possible.
“A ship in the harbour is safe. But that’s not what ships are for.” – John A. Shedd.
Who Taught Us That Hope Is A Scam?
If cynicism is no more than a reflex, it’s one we’ve been carefully trained into. Over the last few decades “hope” has been repackaged into something suspiciously glossy. A marketing mood with a logo attached perhaps. Every supermarket shelf seems to hum with affirmations: “Believe in better”, “because you’re worth it”, “every little helps”. Even my energy bill has “we’re in this together” printed on it. This creates a predictable result: we’re developing a collective rash whenever someone tries to sound sincere.
Barbara Ehrenreich, in Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, called this out back in 2009. Positivity, she argues, has become “an apology for the crueller aspects of the market.” Corporations are using upbeat language to cleanse themselves of the economic pain. Firing staff while telling them to see it as an opportunity. Governments are even adapting this same tone: “resilience” and “grit” being used as euphemisms for austerity. Ehrenrich warned that “even the emotional life must be made to serve market interests,” and it looks like she was right. The cheerfulness industry is an eyewatering trillion-pound machine, padding the illusion that happiness is both for sale and a moral requirement.
We’ve got our own strain of this disease in our own green and pleasant land. Keep Calm and Carry On, once wartime stoicism, now decorates mugs, tea towels and posters. What was born as a rallying cry for survival should it be needed, has been commodified into an emotional sedative. Don’t protest. Don’t panic. Just keep buying. We’ve had our optimism turned into etiquette; despair into bad manners. Even religious institutions and charities are forced to adopt the branding tone of lifestyle start-ups, competing for “engagement” rather than offering meaning.
Globally, the pattern once again repeats. In the United States, “manifestation” culture tells people that poverty is nothing more than a mindset. In Asia, the corporate wellness boom is selling mindfulness subscriptions to overworked employees. Here in Europe, politicians talk about “confidence markets” and “consumer sentiment” as if optimism were a gross domestic product. They’ve converted hope from a political virtue into an economic indicator.
Once that happened, the truly hopeful started to look naive. Expressing genuine optimism, not the performative LinkedIn safe version, feels somewhat rebellious. Little wonder that cynicism has developed such a swagger; it’s the only emotion that remains unsponsored.
What Happens When Scepticism Curdles Into Despair?
There is a point where scepticism stops being a protective shell and starts to digest you. What begins as a reasonable doubt, our intellectual hygiene to prevent us falling for every lie, hardens into a worldview where disappointment is inevitable and hope is embarrassing. Cynicism metastasises into despair.
Mark Fisher described this drift best. In Capitalist Realism (2009) he argues that capitalism isn’t just an economic system; it’s “the atmosphere we breathe.” Capitalism doesn’t need believers, only participants. You can think it unjust and still wake up each day to feed it. Fisher’s phrase, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” captures the paralysis of our age. Realism has been confused with resignation. Seeing everything through has become a badge of intellect, even if it leaves us staring into a fluorescent abyss.
He called this result reflexive impotence. We know exactly how the system is failing, but we feel utterly powerless to stop it. The recognition of this itself becomes a coping mechanism. We talk about how the world is broken, collect the scraps of dopamine from people engaging with us about it, and claim that we are “resisting”. Fisher warned us that capitalism can “metabolise and absorb anything it touches”, even its own criticisms. Outrage becomes content. Cynicism becomes a style. The revolution isn’t just televised, it’s live-streamed, sponsored and forgotten by tomorrow’s algorithm refresh.
And the algorithms love it. Studies have shown that posts expressing hostility towards opposing groups are 67% more likely to be shared (see PNAS research on moralised content diffusion), and that moral-emotional language boosts shares by 15-20%. On Facebook, Meta’s internal research has found that its feed rewards divisive content precisely because anger keeps people scrolling. Outrage generates profit; serenity does not. Our social media platforms couldn’t care less what side we’re on, only that we’re shouting at the other side.
This creates almost an anaesthetic effect rather than a revolutionary one. Doomscrolling feels like vigilance, but all it does is deepen the sense that everything is broken and everyone is awful. Fisher calls this the “self-fulfilling prophecy of helplessness.” If we mistake cynicism for wisdom long enough, we’ll stop testing whether or not change is possible. The system has won twice, first by breaking our faith, and again by convincing us that the faith itself was stupid.
If Hope Is Naive, What’s The Alternative?
After all of that, cynicism feels a damn sight more rational than hope doesn’t it? Optimism is consistently weaponised and critique keeps getting co-opted, so maybe detachment is the only sane move we have left. Why should we bother caring when the system treats empathy like a character flaw and outrage as a currency?
There is indeed a certain dignity to be found in disengagement. The Stoics framed it as a virtue: control what you can, accept what you can’t. Camus called it the absurd; the recognition that life has no fixed meaning, so you might as well keep pushing your boulder anyway. These philosophies offer an intoxicating kind of serenity; but it’s flirting dangerously with surrender. A life without hope must surely be calmer, but it’s rarely courageous.
Modern cynicism has been borrowing the language of those old philosophies, but it’s stripped out all of the discipline. Stoicism demanded a moral focus; today’s detachment is just emotional autopilot. Scroll. Huff. Repeat. If the world is absurd, we’re treating it as entertainment. If change is impossible then at least we can meme about it. This isn’t wisdom, it’s nihilism with a better user experience.
You can see this playing out in the tone of public life. Politicians joke about corruption before anyone else has the chance. Brands are posting about burnout. Even activists are couching their demands in irony, just in case hope makes them look somehow uncool. It’s all defensive; sincerity feels dangerous because it implies a sense of vulnerability, and vulnerability risks disappointment.
But this detachment protects us from nothing, it’s just paralysis that feels philosophical. Refusing to care doesn’t make you clever, it just spares you from the risk of having your heart broken, and heartbreak, conveniently, is where most of our humanity lives.
So perhaps the real alternative to naive hope isn’t cynicism at all. Maybe it’s something harder: staying present without flinching. It’s not the blissed-out optimism of brand campaigns or the aloof claim of a stoic quote on a poster, but a grounded refusal to look away. The kind of hope that openly admits that it might lose, but shows up anyway.
Can Hope Survive Disillusionment?
Perhaps hope no longer has the luxury of naivety. To survive now, it has to grow calluses. There is enough evidence in the world to justify our despair, and yet people keep rebuilding. Families, communities, art, meaning. That stubborn impulse to carry on is what Viktor Frankl called tragic optimism: not optimism despite the darkness, but through it.
Frankl had an unfortunate amount of lived experience here; A psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, he wrote that tragic optimism means “saying yes to life in spite of everything.” He identified what he called the tragic triad; pain, guilt, and death, and argued that even in the shadow of this triad, meaning is possible. “What matters is to make the best of any given situation”, turning suffering into achievement, guilt into self-improvement and mortality into motivation.
This is worlds away from the optimism that’s sold to us in Instagram quotes and corporate newsletters. Frankl’s version is a defiant act of realism that refuses to let despair monopolise intelligence. He does not deny suffering, going as far to call it inevitable, but he does insist that it only becomes unbearable when it seems meaningless. “Man does not live by welfare alone. It is possible to have enough to live by but nothing to live for.”
That insight cuts right to the heart of our modern malaise. We’re living in an age of endless distractions but very little direction. Comfort without conviction. We can order shopping by voice but we can’t use that same voice to explain why we wake up in the morning. Tragic optimism suggests that meaning isn’t found in comfort, but in engagement. In choosing to participate even when the deck is stacked against us.
Flashes of life resisting entropy are all around us. Volunteers running food banks, queer mutual aid networks, artists who paint murals on dilapidated buildings. These are not cheerful scenes at all, but they are determined ones. This is the difference between hope as hallucination and hope as resistance.
Frankl called this “the last of the human freedoms.” The freedom to choose our attitude even when everything else has been taken from us. In a world so seemingly addicted to irony, that’s a radical act. Real hope doesn’t deny there is ruin; it insists that the ruin is not final.
Perhaps this is the point. Cynicism may keep us safe, but hope, the scarred, battered, clear-eyed kind of hope, keeps us human. It’s the choice to keep meaning alive when meaning has no reason left to survive. That kind of hope isn’t easy, but it’s the only kind worth having.
What Does It Mean To Stay Lucid And Hopeful?
We can’t describe hope as a mood anymore, it’s closer to a discipline.
It takes immense effort to stay open-eyed in a world that rewards fatigue. To see the mess around you clearly, the corruption and manipulation, all the rot, and still refuse to let that clarity turn you cold.
Our lives are surrounded by stories of failure. Crumbled governments, greenwashed corporations, movements that have eaten themselves alive. Cynicism feels like literacy. But if we allow ourselves to confuse awareness with surrender, then the systems that we despise have already won. As Mark Fisher warns us, “recognising the system’s injustice” is meaningless if it paralyses us. Awareness must be the beginning, not the endpoint.
Remaining lucid means we have to acknowledge the horrors in our world without letting them hollow us out. To stay hopeful, we must act as though change is still possible, despite every algorithmic post and headline telling us otherwise. Together, it forms a strange kind of realism. One that sees the fractures of our world, but still believes they can be repaired.
I suppose the trick isn’t choosing between cynicism or hope. It’s learning to hold them both without letting either break you. Cynicism sharpens perception, but hope gives us purpose. One without the other is either blindness or giving over to despair.
Maybe this is why I refuse to give up on hope. My daughter is only now starting to learn what the world is. She hasn’t met cynicism yet; to her, everything is still worth touching, still worth exploring. Watching her makes it impossible to fully sink into despair, because even though I may have stopped believing that change is possible for me, I still owe it to her to attempt to try. Hope is less about what I feel, and more about what I owe to the future of the little girl standing in front of me.
Maybe intelligence isn’t seeing through everything. Maybe it’s refusing to stop caring once you do.
The People Who Prove Hope Isn’t Dead
For all the noise about decline, I am surrounded by people who make hope feel less like theory and more like fact.
Ann reminds me that hope isn’t delicate, it’s hard and gritty. It’s something that stands fast despite everything thrown at it. She’s shown me that what looks like optimism is often just endurance that has learned to breathe, staying in the fight.
Sophie, my wife, lives this lesson every day. Her defiance in the face of the world creates its own quiet manifesto: a refusal to be defined by her past, her strength to drag meaning out of mornings where it would be easier to stay down. Her hope isn’t naive; it’s a daily practice.
Jacob, my brother, has earned every inch of his calling. He has worked, studied, and fought to qualify as a paramedic. He walks into the worst nights of people’s lives with steady hands and a quiet grace. His hope does not shout; it just shows up.
Ruby, my chosen sister, keeps outthinking a world that was never built for brains like ours, a world that has tried its hardest to make her small. Every degree, every line of mathematical proof that she’s conquered feels like her own rebellion through intellect. Her hope is the refusal to be erased.
Andy, my business partner and best friend, hauled himself out from his own wreckage and demanded that the world make room for him again. His wife does the same in her own way, despite relentless battles with her health, she spends her days improving other people’s lives through health innovation. Together they remind me that compassion and persistence are not opposites; they’re co-conspirators.
Each of them proves that hope isn’t an abstract virtue. It’s a daily practice, a habit of defiance. The world keeps trying to end them, and every morning they wake up and say not yet.
They are the proof I carry with me when I start to doubt. A reminder that hope still lives out there.
Postscript: Do We Still Deserve Hope?
Perhaps not, but I think we need it anyway.
Hope doesn’t need our permission. It survives on scraps, the plants growing through cracks in the pavement. Hope returns uninvited every time the world goes dark. That’s the entire trick to hope; it’s unreasonable.
And I think we should thank whatever gods may still be listening for that. Because that’s what keeps us from turning to stone.
References & Further Reading
- Brady, W. J., Wills, J. A., et al. (2021). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
- Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Metropolitan Books.
- Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
- Frankl, V. (1984). Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case for Tragic Optimism. Beacon Press.
- Gallup. (2023). Confidence in Media at Record Low in U.S.
- Pew Research Center. (2024). Public Trust in Government: 1958–2024.
- The New York Times. (2022). We’re Staring at Our Phones, Full of Rage for “the Other Side.”
