> The best survival strategy is to fight to improve your situation, not fight to change the world.

Individually, this is probably so. Collectively, it leads to the world becoming more and more shitty, year after year. It's a trap, and no one has figured out a way out.

> Being realist or cynical would help you recognize the situation as it truly stands without looking at it through tainted glasses.

I couldn’t disagree more. To me that is the lie that cynics fool themselves into believing is true.

I have no issue with the Socratic methodology, but the point of it is not to break the systems apart for the sake of finding flaws. It is to break them apart so that they can be reassembled better.

It’s that last part the modern cult of cynics forget too often in my experience. You’re not useful if all you can do is predict the doom and then say “I told you so” when you are proven right. Predicting where things will go wrong is easy, optimists do it as well, what sets them appear is that they try to move past their mistakes and learn for them.

To me no one is either an optimist or a cynic, labelling yourself as being only one is just too limiting, but in my anecdotal experience the people most likely to “make themselves” into just one category are the self-proclaimed realists.

Maybe my experience and opinions are wrong, but I have never come across such an individual who benefitted from their world view. At least no in the privileged world of Scandinavian software.