In Between the Lines of Graduating and Adulthood: Cruel Optimism and Comfortable Pessimism

Words: Leila Edelsztein Satz

It’s not hard to tell apart a final-year student from the various crowds and dwellers of the UoG campus. Identifiable by the vacant stare with which they behold their laptop, revived occasionally by a glint of something in between neurosis and resignation, they are the ones sighing irritably at the excited chatter of freshers, guarding their desk’s charging socket with the vigour of a person whose livelihood is gravely threatened by a dead battery. I know this because I used to look at them and think, at least I still have 3 years left, and because now I am one. 

It comes as no surprise, least of all to the student demographic, that austerity has rendered higher education unrecognisable to what it was 15 years ago. Once a facilitatory space, the soft padding of 3 to 4 government funded years during which a certain lack of pragmatism and direction could be afforded, education has since evolved into a costly consumer good. Much like a financial investment, the prospect of not getting a personal return on a degree by way of a stable career is imminently horrifying, threatening the dreaded realisation that the last few years have an exchange value of lifetime student debt and impressive alcohol tolerance. But can this final-year existential dread be passed off as the inevitable quarter-life crisis, or is it symptomatic of the historical present? 

A possible answer to this can be found in Lauren Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism. Berlant argues that people form attachments to objects or ideals which hinder their ability to thrive. These attachments, described as a manifestation of “cruel optimism”, represent aspirations that are ultimately unachievable or unsustainable within the conditions of late capitalism. For instance, the fraying of ‘conventional good-life fantasies’, such as those of ‘upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy’; the ideal of a stable, fulfilling career in a digital economy, may represent sources of emotional and material security. However, under the precarity of neoliberalism, these attachments ultimately become sources of psychic and emotional harm. In turn, Berlant describes our present as an “impasse” – ‘a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance’. 

The precarious present as a deadlock that is all-consuming – temporary, but with no end in sight – pretty accurately summarises how it feels to reckon with moving back home after graduating. Freshly emancipated from the momentum of the 2-semester year and diligently fighting off cynicism towards a search history of unpaid internships, nauseatingly priced flats on Rightmove, and an endless spiel of self-improvement narratives and entrepreneurial pyramid schemes. It seems that since the time of Berlant’s writing in 2011, the fraying of the good-life fantasies has already occurred. Left behind are a tatter of loose threads to which the only reasonable response is good-natured pessimism, in the hope that by pivoting towards a crippling awareness of the precarity at hand, one might just manage to evade its grip. As a result, the phenomena we’re all facing might be better framed as “comfortable pessimism”.

The comfortability of this pessimism lies in its polarising of anything that remotely disavows its low expectations. When it is safe to assume that job opportunities are impossibly thinning, housing prices are skyrocketing, and welfare is increasingly neglected, any marginally good thing warrants a sigh of relief: the sweet self-assurance that in spite of everything, look at what you still managed to achieve. What might have been considered the standard trajectory of young adult life a handful of decades ago now represents a substantial victory. You have circumnavigated the painfully cyclical regression from your student flat-share back into your childhood bedroom, and, against all odds, completed with a linear model of forwards-marching progress! But after several years of an exorbitantly priced full-time bachelors degree, should baseline financial security really be the unattainable thrilling victory that comfortable pessimism paints it as? 

Perhaps, the only way to move towards changing things is to remove the paradoxical element from these dispositions. If we can allow ourselves pessimism uncomfortably, refusing the impasse present as the status-quo under the belief that existing in acknowledgement might intercept it, then the goal of pure, unfettered optimism might not seem so cruel after all.