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With the acceleration of developments in the region, pessimism floats to the surface in many of our conversations—a legitimate anxiety, but one that sometimes turns into a permanent impression, more of an impression than an accurate reflection of reality.
Here, a professional and ethical question arises: Who creates the culture of optimism?
Journalistic professionalism requires conveying the truth and pinpointing flaws, but it also requires recognizing people's need for joy and hope. People are already burdened by their economic and social loads, and they do not need more alarmism as much as they need a balanced discourse that sees the full picture.
This culture seems absent, and its absence has contributed to increasing the bleakness of the scene. We have come to report only what hurts, forgetting what gives people the ability to keep going.
Have we become societies dominated by a loss of hope?
Social media has institutionalized this condition in two contradictory ways: on the one hand, it broadcasts a torrent of grim news and images that leave a deep impact on souls; on the other hand, it presents ideal images of happiness and success that may be far from their owners' reality, creating a new gap between reality and image.
Optimism is not manufactured by slogans or denial; it is created when people see a tangible impact of their effort—the story of a student who excelled despite straitened circumstances, an initiative in a neighborhood that organized a street, or a small project that started with an idea and grew. These models are not beautifications of reality, but reality itself when we choose to illuminate its other side.
Perhaps the beginning is not in the ministries, but in the language of the home and the school... when we teach our children that criticism does not mean self-flagellation, and when the media decides to dedicate a daily space for a single success story alongside every news item about a crisis, we will have begun to restore balance. Trust does not return by decree, but through the accumulation of sincere positive images.
The manufacture of happiness—or at least the creation of a positive impression—is a shared responsibility. The image and impression are no longer the exclusive domain of any single entity. Everyone is now connected to the event.
Therefore, generating optimism is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity that requires institutional and societal effort. If some countries have established ministries of happiness, we are even more in need of searching for the values and causes of optimism, and for a more balanced space in the battle of daily impressions.
Why do we leave the space of emotions solely to pessimism? The manufacture of grumbling and frustration is more impactful when the practitioners of grumbling are from the elite. Among the most precise sayings regarding the manufacture of despair is the Hadith of the Prophet, peace be upon him: "If a man says: The people are ruined; then he is the most ruined among them," meaning by that whoever promotes the spirit of frustration and a sense of despair among people, while there is always another side of the picture that deserves to be seen?
Optimism is not the denial of reality; rather, it is knowing what hurts us without ignoring what gives us the ability to keep going. We often need concepts of humanization in a space open to stereotyping everything that surrounds us.
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