Cruel Optimism

Summary:

Cruel optimism describes attachment to something you desire that actually prevents you from flourishing. In extreme cases, this can take the form of a desperate dependency, sometimes conflated with love. It is Lauren Berlant's term for why we stay invested in fantasies—relationships, careers, political promises—that harm us. Like refreshing your ex's social media, knowing each scroll deepens the wound, but you are unable to stop.

Analysis:

Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011) asks why people maintain attachments to "the good life" when that fantasy is precisely what exhausts and defeats them. The cruelty isn't external. It's structural—built into the attachment itself.The immigrant parents' sacrifice narrative operates this way. You inherit their dream of "making it," but the dream's terms may be incompatible with who you actually are.

You bend or break yourself for their vision of success while your own atrophies. The attachment to their approval becomes the obstacle to your becoming. Berlant suggests that recognizing cruel optimism doesn't dissolve it. Awareness isn't a solution. You can see the trap clearly and still remain caught.

The question we must ask ourselves, then, is this: what do you do with attachments that sustain and diminish you at once?

I have no clean answer. Only the ongoing uncertainty of a never-ending negotiation with an indifferent cosmos.