It’s not difficult to feel pessimistic right now, especially after last night’s State of the Union and all of its divisiveness on all sides of the aisles, all impotent with the seemingly slouching towards Gomorrah.
The thing that we’re all afraid of has multiple names beyond human words.
Every morning news cycle seems to stack another layer onto an already crowded horizon from ecological instability, biodiversity loss, accelerating AI systems, widening economic uncertainty, political fracture, school shootings, and the persistent drumbeat of conflict. None of these is an abstract trend. They show up in the texture of daily life… in energy debates here in the Carolinas, in conversations about data centers and water use, in classrooms, churches, and family tables, and even in the quiet unease many of us feel about the technological systems reshaping our attention and labor.
The temptation is to respond with denial, despair, or an eternal, paralyzing grief. Denial insists things aren’t really that bad. Despair insists nothing can be done. Both short-circuit meaningful engagement. The algorthims program us to this more than we program the algorithms. Same as it ever was.
But for me, the path toward something like grounded optimism has increasingly come down to two intertwined capacities: empathy and imagination.
Not optimism as cheerfulness or optimism as naive confidence. But optimism is a disciplined openness to possibility within real limits.
Empathy as a Way of Knowing
Empathy is often treated as a moral trait, something we either have or lack (or should eschew). But phenomenologically, it is better understood as a mode of perception.
Edith Stein described empathy not as projecting ourselves into another, nor as observing them from a safe distance, but as a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to us as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully present. Empathy does not collapse difference. It allows relation without possession.
When expanded beyond human-to-human encounters, this becomes an ecological capacity.
To practice ecological empathy is to recognize that forests, rivers, species, and landscapes are not merely resources or backdrops. They are participants in shared conditions of life. Sitting with the black walnut in my backyard here in Spartanburg has taught me more about this than any abstract theory. The tree does not “speak” in human language, yet its seasonal rhythms, vulnerabilities, and persistence disclose a form of presence that invites response. Empathy here is not sentimental projection. It is attentiveness to relational reality.
This matters for optimism because despair often grows from abstraction. When the world is reduced to statistics, models, and catastrophic projections, it becomes psychologically uninhabitable. Empathy returns us to situated relation. It anchors concern in concrete encounters rather than overwhelming totals.
We do not save “the environment.” We learn to live differently with the places and beings already shaping our lives.
Imagination as the Extension of Empathy
If empathy opens us to the reality of others, imagination opens us to possible futures with them.
Imagination is frequently dismissed as escapist or unrealistic, but historically it has been one of humanity’s most practical tools. Every social institution, technological system, ethical reform, or ecological restoration effort began as an imagined alternative to what currently existed.
The crises we face today are not only technical. They are narrative and perceptual. Climate models can tell us what may happen. Economic forecasts can outline risks. AI researchers can map trajectories. But none of these, by themselves, generate livable futures. That requires the imaginative capacity to envision forms of coexistence that do not yet fully exist.
This is why ecological thinkers from Thomas Berry to Joanna Macy have emphasized the importance of story. Without imagination, data produces paralysis. With imagination, data becomes orientation.
Imagination does not deny danger. It prevents danger from becoming destiny.
Why These Matter in the Age of AI
Artificial intelligence intensifies this dynamic.
AI systems increasingly mediate how we work, communicate, and interpret information. They promise efficiency while also raising questions about labor, creativity, authorship, and the ecological costs of computation itself. It is easy to frame this moment as a competition between humans and machines, or as a technological inevitability moving beyond human control.
Empathy and imagination disrupt that framing.
Empathy reminds us that technological systems are embedded in human and ecological contexts. Data centers draw on water and energy. Algorithms shape social behavior. Design choices reflect values. These systems are not autonomous destinies but relational infrastructures whose impacts are distributed across communities and landscapes.
Imagination, meanwhile, allows us to ask better questions than “Will AI replace us?” Instead we can ask: What forms of human and more-than-human flourishing should technology support? What would a genuinely ecological technological future look like? What practices of attention, education, and governance might guide development in that direction?
Without imagination, AI becomes fate, but with imagination, it becomes a field of ethical and ecological design.
Optimism as a Practice, Not a Prediction
The kind of optimism I find credible today is not based on predictions about outcomes. It is based on practices that keep possibilities open.
Empathy keeps us relationally awake.
Imagination keeps us temporally open.
Together, they resist the two dominant distortions of our moment: the reduction of the world to objects and the reduction of the future to inevitabilities.
When we practice empathy, we perceive that the world is still alive with agencies, relationships, and meanings that exceed our control. When we practice imagination, we acknowledge that the future is still under construction, shaped not only by systems but by perception, story, and choice.
This does not eliminate risk. It does not guarantee success. But it sustains participation.
And participation, more than prediction, is what hope requires.
A Quiet Form of Hope
Some mornings, optimism looks less like a grand vision and more like a small act of attention.
Watching the black walnut shift through seasons. Seeing our children learn to perceive and adapt to new challenges, from math problems to social interactions to losing the championship in a youth basketball league, and listening carefully to a student’s question. Reimagining how a church, classroom, or local community might respond differently to ecological pressures. Writing, teaching, or building something that nudges perception toward relation instead of domination.
None of these solves global crises on its own, but they do cultivate the perceptual habits from which meaningful change becomes thinkable.
Empathy grounds us in the reality of shared life while imagination opens that shared life toward futures not yet fixed.
In a time when so much feels predetermined, these two capacities remain profoundly human… and profoundly necessary.
And for me, that is reason enough to remain cautiously, actively optimistic.