How I Learned About Optimism from the Pantheon of Low Budget Film

by Don Hall

Optimism isn’t a trait. It’s not a personality quirk like being good at karaoke or knowing every word to The Breakfast Club. It isn’t a birthright or a naturally occurring element like sodium or Ohioans. No. Optimism is a goddamn habit. Like flossing or lying about flossing. Like checking your phone for notifications you know aren’t there. Like swallowing your own bile when your boss talks about “pivoting to synergies.” Optimism, like all habits, is either cultivated or it calcifies.

We treat optimism in this country like a birthmark or a mental illness—something you either have or don’t. Some people, we say, are “naturally optimistic,” which is like saying some people are “naturally good at surviving bear attacks.” It’s bullshit. Optimism isn’t something you’re born with—it’s something you do, again and again, until it sticks. Until it bleeds into your muscles and grinds your molars down with friction.

This isn’t self-help. This isn’t Tony Robbins huffing kerosene and screaming at the void. This is a battle cry from the back row of the independent theater, where the projector skips, the air smells like damp thrift store couches, and someone’s crying into a PBR tallboy while watching a 17-year-old come out to her closeted Mormon dad in a film that cost less to make than your iPhone.

Let’s get into it.

ACT I: The Lie of the Naturally Positive, or “The Sunshine Mafia”

Let me tell you about Juno. Yes, the quirky teen pregnancy flick with dialogue that sounds like a thesaurus overdosed on Pixy Stix. It’s optimistic, right? Because she’s young and resilient and hipster-smart and has a hamburger phone? Wrong. That movie’s optimistic because it chooses to be. It stares down the barrel of teenage pregnancy, adoption, and adult fuckups, and instead of curling up and dying, it puts on a hoodie, grabs a Slurpee, and plays a guitar.

That’s optimism as habit. Not denial. Not saccharine bullshit. A choice. A repeated act of willful refusal to give in to the entropy of the world.

Compare that to your office’s resident Positive Paul. You know him—the guy who says “Happy Monday!” like it’s a war cry. That guy isn’t optimistic. He’s either a sociopath or a cult recruiter. Real optimism doesn’t sound like a cold call from HR. It’s quieter. It’s harder. It’s forged.

It’s forged in moments like The Florida Project, where a kid living in a motel next to Disney World—America’s temple to manufactured joy—still finds magic in her dilapidated surroundings. Optimism isn’t the castle in the distance. It’s the kid’s grin when she scams a free ice cream cone from a weary tourist. It’s choosing wonder when everything smells like mildew and lost custody battles.

Optimism isn’t born. It’s bloody and bruised and built one brutal day at a time.

ACT II: Pessimism Is the Default Setting—Like Airport CNN

The world gives you every reason to be a pessimist. It’s easier. It’s natural. It’s lazy. Pessimism is the TV left on in the background of your life, playing a loop of school shootings, unpaid bills, and a TikTok teen explaining why you’re a colonizer for owning Tupperware. Pessimism is built into the algorithm.

The real work—the blue-collar emotional labor—is optimism.

Consider 2006’s Half Nelson. Ryan Gosling plays a crack-addicted teacher who somehow, against all odds, gives a damn about one of his students. That movie isn’t cheerful. It’s grimy. But there’s hope in it—real hope—the kind that stinks of sweat and self-loathing but still shows up to class. That’s the habit. You get up. You show up. You fight entropy with intention.

Pessimism is passive. Optimism is active. One is the automatic setting on the microwave of your brain. The other is hacking the damn interface and saying, “Nope, not today.”

ACT III: Building the Muscle—Why Habits Are Just Lies We Tell Ourselves Until They’re True

Time to get practical. How do you build the habit of optimism when the world feels like a Facebook comment thread on fire?

You fake it.

Seriously. You lie. You say, “Today will be okay” when it absolutely won’t. You say, “I can do this” when you clearly cannot. You gaslight yourself into resilience.

And if that sounds crazy, good. Crazy is what saves us.

Remember Lady Bird? She’s not optimistic because life hands her comfort. She’s optimistic because she demands meaning from the meaningless. She renames herself. She rebels. She romanticizes Sacramento like it’s the goddamn Paris of the Pacific. That’s habit. That’s self-created optimism. That’s turning your gray suburban nothing into a technicolor epiphany through sheer defiance.

Optimism is the indie filmmaker in your brain saying, “We don’t have a budget, but we have heart.” No explosions. No CGI. Just grit and grind and a little too much dialogue.

We’re not talking about delusion. We’re talking about practice. You don’t run a marathon by being “naturally athletic.” You run it by getting up at 5 a.m. and bleeding through your sneakers for months. Optimism’s the same: you train for it.

You build it through rituals. You write down one good thing a day. You help a stranger. You refuse to tweet your first reaction. You give a damn about something small and stupid. You do the reps.

Eventually, you’re not faking it anymore.

ACT IV: What Optimism Isn’t

Optimism isn’t ignorance. It’s not pretending everything is fine. It’s not “positive vibes only” horseshit. That’s the cult of Instagram Therapy™, where every emotion must be filtered, flattened, and hashtagged into oblivion.

That’s optimism-for-profit—smiling through your layoffs because the company bought donuts and a motivational poster. Optimism isn’t being okay with the world. It’s saying the world is not okay and living anyway.

It’s the janitor in Good Will Hunting—the quiet character who shows up, does his job, and doesn’t need Matt Damon to solve equations to matter. It’s dignity in the dirt. It’s meaning without medals. It’s knowing you’re disposable in the grand scheme and still showing up to mop the goddamn floors.

Optimism is rage with a heartbeat. It’s rebellion with a backpack. It’s saying, “No, I won’t collapse—not today, not now,” even if everything points to the collapse being inevitable.

It’s not smiling like an idiot. It’s laughing in the middle of a panic attack because the alternative is choking on your own dread.

ACT V: Optimism Is a Choice Made by the Weak—Because the Strong Never Needed It

There’s a belief in this culture that optimism is for the privileged. That you have to have something to hope for something. But that’s backwards.

The people who need optimism the most are the ones on the edge—the broke, the broken, the kicked and forgotten. Optimism isn’t luxury. It’s survival. It’s how you keep going when the plot sucks, the lighting is bad, and the director is asleep at the wheel.

Like Frances Ha—a movie about failing your way into a version of life that almost fits. Frances is a disaster, but she dances. She dances in the street like a lunatic, because that’s how she fights despair. That’s the habit. You learn to dance like no one’s watching even when everyone is and they’re all silently judging you.

Or look at Beasts of the Southern Wild, where a six-year-old girl fights the apocalypse with a fierce belief in her own strength. That’s optimism as muscle memory. That’s habit as salvation.

You don’t become optimistic because life is good. You become optimistic so that life can be.

ACT VI: The Ending Is the Same—But You Get to Choose the Credits Song

Here’s the twist ending: optimism doesn’t save you. It doesn’t make life easier. It doesn’t fix your rent, your credit score, or your nihilistic 23-year-old coworker who thinks quoting Nietzsche counts as personality.

Optimism won’t change the ending. But it changes the experience.

Every indie film you love ends the same: not with triumph, but with perspective. You don’t get the promotion, but you learn how to want something else. You don’t get the girl, but you find your dignity. The car breaks down, but you learn to walk the long way home.

That’s the gift. The habit doesn’t save your life. It makes your life worth saving.

The final scene is always the same: you, staring out a window, the future uncertain, a slow fade to black. But if you’ve built the habit? There’s a soundtrack behind it. A song that says, “It’s not over. It never is.”

You get to choose that song. That’s the habit.

The world is full of shit. That’s not new. That’s the constant. But you? You get to decide if you’re going to sink into it or plant a fucking sunflower in it.

Optimism is a habit. One made by losers, weirdos, broke artists, single moms, ex-cons, janitors, and baristas with MFAs. It’s not noble. It’s necessary. It’s the only weapon we have against a system built to make you numb.

So build it. Practice it. Fake it till it festers into something real.

And when someone tells you to “be realistic,” smile. Because realism is just pessimism with better PR.