When Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before Canadians several weeks ago and warned that “we won’t transform our economy easily or in a few months. It will take some sacrifices,” he was refreshingly honest. Carney acknowledged what few leaders have dared to say so plainly: that the road forward — on climate, on the economy, on social cohesion — will not be smooth or short. Yet he also reminded us that facing these challenges is both a moral duty and an economic imperative. In doing so, he articulated a truth that cuts through today’s fog of fatigue and frustration: progress in this era may not look like triumph but rather like endurance.
Humans are wired for optimism. Psychologists call it the optimism bias: the tendency to expect our actions will bring about positive results rather than negative ones. It’s what makes us save for retirement, plant trees or take medicine. We assume that if we do the right thing today, the future will look brighter tomorrow. Evolution seems to have rewarded those who believed their actions mattered.
That bias has served us well for millennia. It fuels innovation, persistence and the belief that collective effort can yield collective gain. But what happens when the world grows too complicated, too messy and too dire for that optimism to find immediate validation?
We are living through what many thinkers call the polycrisis: a tangle of overlapping, mutually reinforcing crises that span climate, geopolitics, public health, economics and democracy itself. Each problem bleeds into the others. Climate shocks drive migration, which fuels populist backlash, which undermines international cooperation, which makes solving climate change harder. The result is not a single solvable problem but a self-reinforcing web of instability.
In this environment, the optimism bias starts to falter. Because the truth is that in a polycrisis, even our best actions rarely produce visible “wins.” Driving an electric vehicle, paying a carbon tax or insulating our homes — these are all necessary acts. But they do not yield the kind of instant, headline-grabbing improvement our brains crave. At best, they slow the damage. At best, they make things less bad than they would have been otherwise.
In nearly every domain of our polycrisis, success is measured not by reversal but by containment.
The New Reality of Incremental Changes
Carney’s climate remarks — calling it both a moral obligation and an economic necessity — reflect precisely this tension. There will be no single breakthrough policy or technology that “fixes” the climate crisis, no fiscal lever that instantly stabilizes an overheating world. Instead, there will be a series of difficult, incremental decisions that prevent things from getting dramatically worse. And yet, in the current political climate — where quick fixes and populist certainties crowd out realism — that kind of honesty feels almost radical.
This “less bad” logic applies far beyond climate change. A fragile truce in a war zone may not bring peace, but it prevents another thousand deaths. A central bank’s rate hike may not restore prosperity, but it stops hyperinflation. Modest reforms to democratic institutions may not renew faith in government, but they can slow the slide into authoritarianism. In nearly every domain of our polycrisis, success is measured not by reversal but by containment.
The challenge is that human beings are not naturally motivated by containment. We are wired for reward, not restraint. When sacrifices yield only the absence of something worse — rather than the presence of something better — we grow cynical.
You can see it in climate fatigue, where years of recycling, policy battles and international summits haven’t produced the clean turnaround people hoped for. You see it in politics, where faith in the liberal democratic order is faltering, and charismatic populists step in to offer easy but empty solutions. You see it in economics, where citizens ask why belt-tightening is worth it if prosperity seems to recede further into the horizon.
That loss of faith is itself a threat. If we cannot recalibrate our expectations, we risk handing power to those who promise easy answers — denying the complexity of the world for the comfort of a simple story. The irony is that those “solutions” almost always make things worse.
Politically, this is a hard message to sell. No campaign slogan has ever said, “Vote for me, and I’ll make sure things don’t get worse as quickly.” Yet, increasingly, that’s the sort of sober honesty democracy needs. There are no panaceas coming in this week’s budget, no fiscal miracle that can make up for decades of delayed action on climate and inequality. What matters is whether the government is willing to make hard choices — imperfect, incremental but real — and whether citizens are willing to stay the course.
So, how do we sustain motivation in a world of deferred gratification? Perhaps by reframing what moral success looks like. We must learn to value prevention as deeply as we value progress. To see restraint as an act of courage, not defeat. When we pay taxes, support a policy or endure that painful adjustment, the payoff may not be visible. The reward may simply be that the world our children inherit is less broken than it could have been.
This is not the story that optimism bias taught us to tell. But it may be the story that sustains us through the next chapter.
If Carney’s speech signals anything, it is that realism need not mean resignation. It can mean resolve: the courage to keep rowing, even when the shore is nowhere in sight. The years ahead will test our patience, our politics and our collective sense of purpose. But if we can recognize “less bad” as its own kind of victory — an act of stewardship rather than surrender — we might just navigate through the storm, holding the line for a future still worth fighting for.
