Most people in the US begin life poor, and most of them are not poor forever. I wouldn't call this a "bleak future". I was definitely poor when I was 18, but I wasn't pessimistic. Pessimism at such a young age is almost always a mistake.
I'd like to challenge that. Historical comparisons aside, looking just at today, if you're saying that social mobility is very good in the USA compared to most of the world, what are you basing that claim on?
I would think something like Gini combined with HDI and GDP per capita, on which the US only fares well on the latter. I found out there is something called Global Social Mobility Index, done by the WEF, and it places the US in 27th.
Also looking a bit more at the GSMI: a lot of those criteria are based on current social welfare benefits received by the population. Many of which programs are not sustainable in the long run.
Of course the US has less of a social safety net than Norway, a petrostate with trillions of dollars in a national oil endowment, and ~half of their GDP is from fossil fuels. I don't know that I'd want to move to Norway for the kind of "social mobility" that I'm after.
I'm basing on my assumption vast majority of the world's people would love to be 27th.
And this is borne out in emigration patterns and visa applications...
It feels like we expect to be #1 in every category and we're unable to recognize that the US has it pretty damn good in a lot of important ways. Envy is the thief of happiness.
You can develop pessimism without a conscious choice, but once you become aware of how negative your outlook is, it's a conscious choice to not try to do better.
Being pessimistic about pessimism is individual-damaging and socially ruinous.
One can develop pessimism about pessimism without a conscious choice, but once you become aware of how negative your outlook on pessimism is, it's a conscious choice to not try to figure out the different meanings of that word and how important it is for the proper functioning of democracy.
Maybe read Orwell for a glimpse of mandatory optimism:
"The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one...
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the
expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing
the telescreen.
Indeed most choices we think we "make" are unconscious choices due to our environment. That does not mean we cannot introspect and learn and consciously change them.
I am much more pessimistic generally than I was 20 years ago. But that's something I work on, not something I accept passively as a fact of life.
