Marketing Without "Cruel Optimism"
Marketing individual solutions to systemic problems can be awkward.
On the one hand, people do need those solutions.
Most folks need more freedom and stability — emotional, material, usually both — before they can be reliable collective agents.
On the other hand, so much of self-help marketing essentially gaslights its audience with the message: “It’s all in your head. You can take responsibility and have a different experience.”
Which is very appealing bullshit.
A Stanford study shows the top causes of stress in the U.S. are things like lack of health insurance, constant threat of layoffs, long working hours…
In other words, conditions imposed from the outside. NOT stuff that’s “all in your head.”
In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari cites this study to explain Cruel Optimism, a concept coined by theorist Lauren Berlant in her book of the same name.
Cruel Optimism is a heady book so I appreciate Hari’s simplified definition:
“[Cruel Optimism is]...when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture…and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution.
It sounds optimistic because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon—but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.”
Sound familiar?
Cruel Optimism is the status quo posture of self-help marketing and most neoliberal thinking in general.
It's an alluring premise. “YOU can rise above where most struggle, because actually struggle is just an illusion held by people who don’t know better, lack willpower, or have the wrong thoughts in their head.”
Eek!
For those of us keenly aware of how the system presses on most peoples’ ability to live what Lauren Berlant calls “the good life,” to market any individual solution to problems with deep roots presents an uncomfortable tension.
We don’t want to be cruel or at best, out-of-touch.
But individuals caught in the system do need and want help.
And the people I work with, for instance, have genuine help to offer.
My clients have wisdom, tools, skills and methods that help people live better lives, start their own businesses, feel less bedraggled by stress — despite difficult, sometimes intractable circumstances.
If that’s you:
Your optimism is needed.
Your belief that change is possible is vital.
Your vision for how life could be easier or lighter, more meaningful or more satisfying, more expressed and less repressed, more connected and less alienated — has the potential to be realized for many people.
Importantly, you have the know-how for getting there.
And without that kind of leadership, welp, we may as well all sink into cynicism and despair.
So the question is…
When does marketing your confidence in an individual’s capacity to better themselves become cruel?
How can it be done with kindness?
What would KIND OPTIMISM look like?
A few quick ideas:
Kind Optimism is LASER-SPECIFIC about its intended audience.
Who EXACTLY is poised to realize your vision for them? What resources, support, talent and experience do they already have in place that allows them to benefit from your work? If you speak to that clearly when you sell, you reduce the amount of people hearing the message who it “will never work for.” (And perhaps, without forgetting about those who don’t have the same options.)
Kind Optimism holds people in high regard.
You know that whatever they struggle with is not just all-in-their-head. So you respectfully build them up. You recognize where they are already doing a great job coping, surviving, perhaps even thriving in certain areas. Show them this kindness and compassion: they make total sense. And, fuel their capacity to shift the parameters of their life. Not because they are a problem, but because their desires are worth taking seriously.
Kind Optimism sees the big picture.
It’s nuanced work to recognize the ways the world is not set up to support peoples’ agency, upward mobility, expression, creativity, etc — without surrendering to defeat and despair. We need this nuanced leadership. To both hold the systemic analysis and vision for collective change, and illustrate how individual actualization can contribute to that goal in serious yet small ways. (As opposed to the neoliberal facade of progress.)
Kind Optimism never presses pain or shame.
These are not sustainable motivators for change. Worse, they may provoke an impulsive purchase that someone is unequipped to carry out — resulting in a rather cruelscenario that is all too common in self-help marketing.
Kind Optimism illustrates minimum viable outcomes.
What is the smallest transformation you can offer, in respect to the constraints that may not realistically be lifted anytime soon? What makes that transformation worth investing in? (Again it’s important to be transparent about WHO can carry the load of the investment.) Dig deeper and you’ll speak to values that can provide existential meaning — the will and joy to keep going — without projecting fantasy outcomes.
Am I missing anything? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Hit reply. (Perhaps, with your consent, I’ll quote you in my next newsletter?)
I admit I won’t be finishing Lauren Berlant’s book — the sample proved more academic than I have the taste or patience for — but I want to leave you with this bit from a New Yorker article about Berlant that I DID read to completion (go me!):
“In the absence of real stability—the state of affairs that we must come to terms with—there is still the possibility of true solidarity, the experience of ‘having adventures and being in the impasse together, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and also, allowing for some healing and resting, waiting for it not to drop.’ In moments like these, Berlant’s work can feel strangely and kindly optimistic. ”
My hope…
If Cruel Optimism is the fuel that drives neoliberalism — perhaps Kind Optimism can energize a different kind of economy. Slowly but surely.
Because we still need each other.
We still need things to look forward to.
And possibilities exist that we haven’t yet realized.
I believe that 100%.