Pessimism sucks

I’ve started to realise something I don’t want to believe about myself. I think I’ve become a pessimist, and I hate that, because I don’t want to see the world like this. But when I look around, through the eyes of love, our greatest power, it becomes hard not to.

I grew up feeling something different, before everything sped up, before everything became content, before attention got monetised and fed back to us as identity. And now I watch that feeling disappear, replaced by mass advertisement, by capitalism that doesn’t just sell products but shapes desire, by technology that doesn’t just support life but slowly starts to replace it.

Craft is disappearing, or worse, being flattened into something performative. Short term gratification is sold as success and it’s everywhere, and it makes me pessimistic about the future, because these aren’t small issues, but they’re treated like they are.

Politically and culturally, it feels like the people in power aren’t even looking in the right direction, an overwhelming surplus of people holding control, too comfortable and too detached to realise they’re screwing over the generations that come after them, their own grandkids.

And in the space I move in, what used to be niche, respected and built on actual craft is now overrun by status, money and visibility, Tiktok brands printing meaning onto t shirts just to fill landfills with more nothing, and the worst part is how normal it’s become.

Accessibility was supposed to open things up, but instead it diluted something that once mattered, and this isn’t just one space, it’s everywhere. Social media is becoming derivative and everything starts to look the same, the same aesthetics, the same formulas, the same idea of what is good.

We’re constantly presented with perfection, the perfect life, the perfect look, the perfect outcome, a formula that once worked now endlessly copied until it means nothing, and with every copy the space gets tighter, leaving less room for honesty, less room for risk and less room for something real.

And I see people fold into it, creatives especially, breaking their integrity piece by piece just to survive in a system that rewards imitation, and the ones who don’t often just stop.

So yeah, I’m a pessimist, and I really don’t want to be, because I still crave excitement, I still crave optimism, I still want to believe in what can be. I don’t accept that everything has already been done and I don’t accept that this is it.

Therefore, within this rejection to become a fulltime lifer in pessimism I started Romance on Mars. It’s a yet to be manifested manifestation of what I would want and feel, and reject pessimism, a neo romantic view filled with optimism, excitement and a smidge of realism for my future self and those who seek this.

This is not about ignoring what’s happening, it’s about refusing to let it be the only thing that exists, because if everything around me starts to feel empty then I’d rather build something that isn’t, even if it’s small, even if it’s fragile, even if it doesn’t fit.

I’m not an optimist, not yet.

So I'll cosplay this feeling that I want to manifest until I will feel this truly, hopefully it can help you in any way shape or form.