Thinking about Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and what I don’t think she examines enough is how many of us KNOW that the things we are hoping for & working towards are false, impossible and obstacles to our thriving but that Late Capitalism requires active and conscious self-deception.

That there are gaps btw the ideas of the good life that we attach ourselves to where we can deconstruct our desires. But that we live within intractable conditions that push us to return again and again to self-delusion and normative concepts of the good life JUST to continue on.

It isn’t just that capitalism sells us these visions so successfully. It’s also that it exists in such a totalizing way that we struggle to imagine otherwise or believe such imaginings. Or we are so flattened by capitalism our cruel optimisms are known fictions that enable us.