Choosing hope after seeing the darkness.
On turning 27, witnessing wars, and what it means to choose hope and optimism without being naive.
🌎📡
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You’re reading Be Greater. — A publication from the last offline generation.
*a newsletter for those who want to explore what it means to raise our standards and live better in order to be greater in the modern world.
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As I write this, I just turned 27. 🎉
Twenty-seven laps around the sun with you all. And honestly, my generation has seen enough to justify having a pretty bleak outlook on things.
We grew up in the post 9/11 world — learning about it on classroom screens before we were old enough to understand what it really meant. We watched the following wars play out across the next two decades. We were teenagers during the 2008 financial collapse, watching stable adults lose everything while the people responsible largely walked away fine. We came of age alongside the internet and social media and we watched it transform from something genuinely exciting and fun into something addictive, extractive, and dividing.
Then a global pandemic arrived, forced the world into lockdown, and accelerated many of these negative social trends. We started spending even less time together in public and gravitated towards staying inside more. Separated. Isolated.
We’ve watched political polarization make basic conversations feel impossible. Even when we debate, it can feel pointless because what does it accomplish anyway? We’ve watched trust in institutions collapse in real time. We’ve seen blatant corruption and bribery in governments. We’ve seen powerful people and elected officials repeatedly make choices that 70%+ of the population disagrees with.
My generation has legitimate reasons to be tired, cynical, jaded, and pessimistic.
And yet, I’m not. Many of us are not.
I’m genuinely, stubbornly, optimistic about the world and hopeful for our future.
Here’s why.
Optimism as a Philosophy
A German poet named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote: “When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; but when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.”
Centuries later, Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, taught and spoke of this same philosophy.
He was someone with more cause than almost anyone to abandon hope in humanity entirely.
But he didn’t.
He said:
“If we take man as he is, we make him worse.
But if we take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be.”
His point was that idealists and optimists aren’t being unrealistic. Pessimists think they’re being “more realistic” about human nature — but what they’re actually doing is contributing to the very reality they claim to be describing. If you treat people like they’re selfish and broken and beyond help, you encourage more of that.
But if you hold people to a higher standard — if you genuinely believe they’re capable of more — you create the conditions for them to actually rise to it.
The ones who actually believe that something can be done are the ones who go on to make it happen. The idealist is the real realist.
That hits a little harder once you know who’s saying it. This wasn’t someone with an easy life who decided to be positive. This was someone who survived some of the worst things humans have done to each other in modern history and came out the other side still believing in human potential.
There’s no way he could be considered naive.
If he could hold that standard and remain hopeful after everything that he witnessed, then we can remain hopeful in the modern world.
What Isn’t Talked About Enough
Yes, we’ve witnessed the attacks, the wars, the crashes, the pandemic, the cultural decline. All of that is real.
But we’ve also seen the other side of things. The part that barely makes the news:
We watched scientists develop a COVID vaccine in under a year through unprecedented global cooperation — researchers in different countries sharing data in real time, racing together toward a solution instead of competing for credit.
We watched the ozone layer — once considered a catastrophic environmental disaster — begin to actually heal after nations came together, listened to scientists, and banned the chemicals destroying it. It’s on track for full recovery by mid-century.
We watched renewable energy break its own records in 2024 with the fastest growth rate ever recorded. The transition is happening — imperfectly, not fast enough, but accelerating every year.
Extreme poverty has dropped by more than half in our lifetimes. Child mortality has fallen. Literacy has risen.
It’s important to remember:
“The generation that survived the Great Depression went on to split the atom, cure polio, and walk on the moon.”
Overcoming challenges will always provide more development, growth, and wisdom than living an easy life with no meaningful obstacles to overcome.
And in the quieter corners of the world, people are choosing to be greater every single day without anyone requiring it. Volunteering after disasters. Donating to strangers. Showing up for their communities. Having honest conversations. Making real things. Helping someone whose car broke down for no reason other than they could.
That impulse hasn’t gone anywhere.
Growth and progress are quiet. Destruction and outrage are loud. But the progress is real — and it deserves the same attention we give the decline.
The Offline / Online Perspective
My generation grew up in a unique position.
We experienced an offline childhood and an online adulthood. We lived deeply in both worlds. That in-between perspective gives us something that neither pure digital natives nor people who never fully made the transition can claim — we can see both what was lost and what was gained. We’re not purely nostalgic and we’re not blindly optimistic.
We’re definitely not naive about technology. We grew up alongside it. We learned it at every new stage and development. We watched it go from something liberating to something extractive. And because we watched that transformation happen in real time, we feel and understand it in a way that people who only knew one side of it never fully will.
That understanding is our responsibility.
We are the generation that can look at what the internet has become and say — this isn’t what it has to be. We can build something better. We can bring the best parts of the offline and online worlds forward instead of just accepting what the algorithm has decided to make of things.
The question is, do we want to change things bad enough to actually do something about it?
Optimism as a Standard
Here’s what I’ve learned about hope.
It’s not just a feeling. Feelings come and go. The world will always produce enough bad news to kill the feeling on any given day if you let it.
Optimism is a mindset. A standard you set. A decision you make before the day starts, before the news loads, and before the algorithm decides what to show you next.
Because belief is a powerful thing. The ones with no hope are the ones who give up, and stop pursuing their goals. But the ones who truly believe it’s possible, or even inevitable, to reach their goals will continue chasing them for as long as they have hope.
That’s not naivety. That’s strategy.
The pessimist thinks they’re being realistic. But the person who genuinely believes in our human potential and builds their life around that belief is doing more to shape reality than anyone who just watches things decline and says they saw it coming.
In that way, the philosopher Frankl was right. The idealists are the real realists.
What I Believe
I still believe in lasting peace. Not because the wars have ended — they haven’t — but because I’ve seen what humanity is capable of when we actually work together. And I know we’re capable of accomplishing way more than anything we’ve seen so far.
I still believe in love. My parents separated before I was old enough to understand what that meant. But I still believe in commitment and partnership and building something together that outlasts whatever difficulties come. I’m married now and I want to take this all the way to the finish line and beyond. Not because it’s easy — because it’s worth it.
I believe in the people reading this newsletter. The ones who sense that something important shifted as the world moved online and want to do something about it. Who pick up trash they didn’t drop and return the cart when nobody’s watching and try to hold a higher standard even when the culture makes it easier not to. The ones out there spreading love and positivity and chasing dreams and supporting each other.
Those people aren’t naive.
They’re the bravest people in any room. They’ve seen the darkness of the world just like the rest of us — and they’ve decided to stay positive and build something better anyway.
Whether you’re 18, 27, or 80 — most of us have seen enough to be cynical.
But we choose not to be.
Not because the world has earned our optimism. But because we’ve decided that optimism is the standard we’re going to hold. With bravery, and discipline. The same way that every person who ever really changed anything held a standard that the world around them wasn’t requiring.
The world doesn’t get better because circumstances improve and then people feel hopeful again.
It gets better because people choose hope first — and then they build and work for the circumstances that justify it.
It’s not always trending, but it will always be cool to have hope.
Love you all. Thanks for reading.
Here’s to another lap around the sun. Let’s make it count.
Log off, spread love, be greater.
— [gf] 🎂