“You are not a lottery ticket,” writes Peter Thiel in Zero to One, his book on entrepreneurship. “A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.”

Chapter 6 of Zero to One is the type of writing that I need to constantly reread. I remember Thiel’s presentation of the Definite-Indefinite and Optimistic-Pessimistic conceptualization of attitudes toward the future, and it blew my mind.

Reading the same words again, same reaction. Like a sigh of relief, knowing that I don’t have to rely on the same old narratives again.

Thiel considers that America in the 50s and 60s was in a period of Definite Optimism, where the future would be awesome and it would look like life on the moon and all sorts of concrete pictures. From there, it would be relatively easy to reverse engineer all the other things that you would need to discover before getting to the moon. Kind of like visualization/goal setting on a societal level.

In contrast, America now (post 1972) is in a period of Indefinite Optimism, where the future will be awesome but we don’t know what it will look like. With this attitude, all the power flows from the visionaries and the doers to the managers and bureaucrats and stewards – the people who can keep things running smoothly until we get to that future.

With respect to Mr. Thiel, when I look back at my attitude toward the future when I graduated from high school in the early 2000s, I wonder if America (at least America’s youth) has entered a period of Indefinite Pessimism. I don’t know what the future will look like (some people claim it’s the Golden and/or Diamond Age, while others predict a civil war or some other disastrous civic upheaval) but I’m pretty sure it will be impacted by – at very least – an huge economic collapse of some sort.

I distinctly remember telling my mother once that it was very hard to set goals when you know that the economy will collapse when I’m halfway to it. I don’t think I’m the only person of my generation who thinks this way. It’s been very clear for a while that we are headed downhill as a functional society.

And people wonder why Millennials and Gen Z have such a nihilism problem.

Anyhow, if you’ve been reading this blog you know that I’m working to combat this indefiniteness by making plans and learning how to grow and be prepared for the future, whatever it may bring. The dying institutions have been good to me so far (the “accident of birth” that Thiel rejects) but I know it won’t last.

I appreciate Thiel’s perspective because he is relentlessly optimistic (but not peppy) and 100% sure that he can change the world. Obviously, in hindsight, because he DID change the world.

You have to be able to see something to reach it, so start looking.