Self-embetterment is tough. There is no one single solution that works for everyone. It's easy to offer patronizing advice to those who are stuggling.
Cruel optimism...boils down to the folly of suggesting personal solutions to systemic problems. It’s about advice given from a position of privilege to people who will never be able to apply it to their own lives–because the cards are stacked so unfairly against them–but who will nonetheless interpret their failure as a personal one. The real harm comes from the stuff that sounds reasonable and actionable, like most self-help books.
The world has temptations that make you lose focus on achieving your goals, but "you don’t need perfect conditions to grow and to create."
Amazon used to be great. Facebook used to be great. Now some have observed that TikTok is starting to get crappy. Some are even saying this is true of Medium and Substack.
Even The Economist has observed that all the diversity and equity efforts are backfiring.
One result of all this is growing “resistance, anger, grumpiness, and eventually backlash” to the proliferation of diversity officials, says Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University, one of the authors of the study on diversity training at American universities. Many white male professors, she found, now limit campus interaction with minorities and women, lest an unintentional slight get them in trouble. High spending on diversity officials also leads to fewer classes, as well as higher tuition fees, which make it harder for minorities, who are disproportionately poor, to attend college.
Some of my friends in academia confided to me that it's difficult to work with students now. You never know when one of them might sense microaggression and report an encounter to authorities.