The government is paralyzed by toxic polarization. Our economic and social systems make the rich richer and keep the poor poorer. Marginalized groups continue to fight against centuries of systemic injustices. A pandemic has killed more than 1 million Americans. Meanwhile, preventable “deaths of despair”—including suicide and deaths related to substance abuse—are on the rise. Fewer and fewer people are choosing to have children, citing not only economic concerns but moral ones: How could anyone bring an infant into a world as benighted by cruelty and injustice as this one? The thinking goes like this: The inevitable march of climate change will probably wipe out humanity, anyway. At least, if artificial intelligence doesn’t get there first.

This dismal assessment of America’s prospects feels inescapable in some circles right now.

“Cultural pessimism is more widespread and much more public than it used to be,” Rhys Williams, a Loyola University Chicago sociologist who specializes in the relationship between politics, religion, and social movements in America, told me.

[Read: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid]

The posture of broad doomerism can feel like a natural response to the major events of the 21st century so far. At times, it can even feel socially expected. After all, how could any reasonable person look at economic strife and racial injustice and mass death and not feel despair?

But part of cultural pessimism’s pervasiveness comes from the fact that it’s self-reinforcing, as a highly marketable narrative of despair that sells resigned inaction (to say nothing of scented candles, bath bubbles, and other products meant to soothe). To break out of the spiral of doom requires not just practical social change, but also a collective reimagining of what the world can be.

It’s possible to treat our collective pessimism not as a function of “the worst possible timeline,” to quote an ubiquitous meme derived from the TV show Community, but rather a natural corollary of our distinctly American optimism: our tradition of idealistic cultural narratives that things ought to be better than they are. If the technological and economic improvements that have marked so much of modern life have allowed us to question—and even become angry about—areas where we perceive work yet to be done, then we’re simply participating in a long-standing American tradition of working toward perfection in an imperfect world.

Such a framework doesn’t lead automatically to social change, of course. But it can provide a compelling collective vision, and hope, for the best of societal ideas. And it can help lead to the kind of social culture necessary for any kind of change to occur—that is, an environment where individuals have both the opportunity and the desire to organize with members of their community in pursuit of collective gain.

This mindset change might seem a long way off. According to one bipartisan NBC study from early 2023, 71 percent of Americans say we’re on the wrong track as a country—the eighth time in the past nine quarters that this survey percentage has crossed 70 percent, marking the longest period of severe American pessimism since polling began more than 30 years ago.

But why now? America has been through public crises before and emerged with greater levels of trust and hope. Just think of October 6, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when public trust in government reached its highest level since before the Nixon administration. Or March 2004, at the dawn of the Iraq War, when a full 71 percent of Americans expressed approval of George W. Bush’s presidency.

So, what’s changed? One strain of answer—recently expressed by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind (which originated in this magazine)—is that the rise of social-justice language, and our increased cultural focus on problems as entrenched and systemic—has conditioned the American public, particularly on the left, to see themselves as helpless victims, unable to effect change. As evidence, Lukianoff and Haidt point to a recent study in SSM—Mental Health that suggested both an increase in self-reported mental-health issues among teenagers, dating back to 2012, and a marked disparity between the mental health of young liberals and young conservatives.

The “wokeness has made us weak” narrative overlooks the degree to which both the rise of social-justice discourse and an ever-more-pervasive sense of cultural pessimism are downstream of a wider phenomenon: an ubiquitous sense of alienation from the foundational mythos of the “American dream” and—no less vitally—from one another. Just as the years since the 2008 financial crisis have shaken our cultural conviction that virtuous hard work leads to economic stability, so, too, has the social-media era transformed our shared political life into a source of alienating infotainment, monetized by the demands of the attention economy. (The rise in depression covered by the Mental Health study also correlates with the increased availability of smartphones and social media for teenagers.)

[Read: The age of social media is ending]

“Social media has pulled back the curtains a bit on institutions and the elites who run them and afforded a rather unflattering view of what goes on behind the scenes,” the Yale sociology professor Philip Gorski told me—“things that in the years of three broadcast-news channels and no national newspapers would never really have penetrated in the public consciousness.” Ordinary social-media users had access, for example, to information about the early failings of the CDC to issue functional COVID-19 tests in early 2020, during the crucial first few weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, Gorski says, fewer and fewer of us are getting to know the people around us at all. He cited “the gradual decline of voluntary association” in America, as fewer and fewer of us attend religious services, belong to community organizations, or even have close friends. And he said that most Americans “are very unlikely to encounter people who are very much unlike them, much less to come to trust them.” Even if they do, Gorski told me, our political and civic lives have become so self-segregated that “the odds that they’ll really encounter somebody significantly different from them along any number of dimensions is just so much lower than it used to be.”

Williams, of Loyola University Chicago, agreed, saying that today “preexisting communities of solidarity or communities of memory are more difficult to form.” And without real-life, in-person social interactions—particularly with those who don’t share our ideological priors or identities—we struggle more and more to envision the kinds of necessary societal changes that require not just individual but collective action.

“What we’re seeing,” says Musa al-Gharbi, a doctoral student at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite, “is this self-reinforcing negative cycle.” He also calls it a “doom loop” where “cynicism and despair can often encourage nihilism” or there are “people taking cosmetically radical symbolic positions because they don’t do anything, practically speaking.” Cynicism “encourages those kinds of behaviors, which can erode public trust, which can further undermine our capacity to actually achieve change, reinforcing our sense of pessimism.” The academic language of the systemic—a term with specific social-justice applications—has morphed into a wider sense that the system is so rigged that we might as well not bother doing anything at all. If cultural despair is evidence of the gap between ideals and reality, today’s pessimism suggests that the gap feels unbridgeable.

Such a reading might also account for why young liberals seem to report so much more depression than their conservative counterparts. “The expectation versus experience is really the key,” Williams said.

One easy reading of such a mindset might be that progressive idealism is inherently bad for our mental health—expecting grand change can only lead to depression and failure. But the role that expectations play in our sense of contentment also invites us to consider ourselves not as potential dwellers in our end-stage utopia but rather as participants in an unfinished—and perhaps unfinishable—journey toward a more just world. It is a journey that is worth undertaking for its own sake, rather than because we believe results are imminent. We can expect less while still hoping—and working—for more.

Such a mindset shift might help people better reframe their own despair: If someone is dissatisfied, it’s because that person can envision how much better our society could be. But to get there, suggests Cece Jones-Davis, an activist and author who lectures frequently on effective organizing, we have to learn once more to live and work with one another, in communities that require us to lay aside our personal narratives and preferences. We have, in other words, to start small: focusing on achievable local concerns, rather than grand national narratives.

“Once we … bring all the things that we think about every issue in the world” to the table, Jones-Davis said in a telephone interview, “then things fall apart.” Conversely, she said, “when you start small, you’re having smaller circles, smaller conversations; you’re getting to know people; you’re building trust among groups … and everybody starts to get to know everybody.” By forging human relationships at a sustainable scale—and by mobilizing those relationships toward the common good—we can develop pathways toward change.

The doom spiral of cultural pessimism can best be combated by—as internet parlance has it—“touching grass”: encountering human beings in the kind of real-life social situations where change, however small or modest in scale, is possible. That kind of in-person work can help to turn our collective disillusionment into an engine of hope, a reminder that our present disappointments are inextricable from a belief that a better world is something we owe to ourselves—and to one another.