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To live in the 'anthropocene', or 'misanthropocene' as we might call it after Grimes, is to inhabit an era of fraying, of physical exhaustion and deterioration of life, and of the means for life-building.
Cruel optimism, as Lauren Berlant defines it, is an attachment to an object, a fantasy, that actively impedes the aim that brought you to it. One invests an object, a commitment, a relationship, with promises that it never fulfils. But the relation is optimistic, despite all the anxiety and depression it generates, because you still hope that the it can be repaired, that it can give you what you want.
We are at an impasse, Berlant says. A situation in which there is much frantic movement but little progress. In which, for millions of people who were previously relatively protected from the worst of capitalist precarity, life seems both "intensely present and enigmatic". It is impossible to know how to orient oneself in it, because one doesn't know exactly what it is. It is clear that the old attachments are in crisis. That life-building is becoming more precarious and difficult. That ideas of the 'good life' that were once consensual across broad populations no longer look like laudable promises.
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