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Optimism is usually defined as belief that thing will go will. But this is incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between I filled with misery. And in fact you know it will be filed with misery. You can be optimistic that the long term growth trajectory is up and to the right, but equally sure that the road between now and then is filled with and landmines and always will be, those two things are not mutually exclusive.
The idea that something can gain over the long run while being a basket case in the short run is not intuitive, but it is how a lot of things work in life. By Age 20 the average person can lose roughly half the synaptic connections they had in their brain at age two as inefficient and redundant neural pathways are cleared out. But the average 20 year old is much smarter than the average two yea old. Destruction in the face of progress is not only possible, but an efficient way to get rid of excess.
