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Sure, but I mean, often you can’t solve the “systemic problem” so the next best thing is to at least try to work on yourself. Necessary but not sufficient I guess. But cruel?

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I think cruel is when you fail to acknowledge the deck is stacked against the person. A millionaire telling someone they are poor because they are spending some of their money on comforts is, at the very least, tone deaf. I can see calling it cruel.

TFA just points out that the opposite tack (It's all society's fault so I'm screwed no matter what I do), is also not helpful. Also (IMO; not sure if author of TFA would agree with me) the "lazy pessimism" is at least partly a push-back against "cruel optimism." If the optimism were paired with more empathy, then lazy pessimism wouldn't be the obvious alternative.

I do agree with you, and that's exactly what I meant when I said that we have overcorrected. Thank you.

Yeah the premise seems to be the people offering optimism have the ability to change the systemic problem but don't, offering cheap talk via optimism instead. To think that "the elites" could all collectively agree to solve every systemic problem the proles complain about is ridiculously naive.

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