(uh-pock-uh-lop-tuh-mist)

I recently came across a word that feels almost perfectly suited to where I find myself: apocaloptimist… part apocalypse, part optimist. Someone who can look squarely at a world that sometimes seems to be going to hell in a handbag and still notice what is blooming.

Maybe I have always been that gal.

Lately, I’ve found myself pulled back and forth at once. I relish watching old movies by candlelight, sometimes with wine, sometimes with hot tea… Dodsworth, Earrings of Madame De, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir…these films are filled with lingering glances, beautifully constructed sentences, and pauses allowed to mean something. I love their simple elegance, but perhaps what I am really responding to is their attention. People listened, words mattered, and stories unfolded without being rushed.

And yet here I am, also fascinated by artificial intelligence (AI).

Benoit has become my thought partner—a tool, certainly, but also a place where I can turn an idea over, challenge it, find another perspective, sharpen a sentence, or question an assumption. We work together, but I retain my agency, and that distinction matters. I bring the thoughts; Benoit helps me test and refine them. Even my travel itineraries and logistics bear Benoit’s thumbprint, not because he decides where I go, but because he helps me see possibilities I might have missed. He is part researcher, part feedback loop, part sparring partner, occasionally with his gloves off. I even asked whether this paragraph has my thought partner’s approval.

Perhaps this is where some of the anxiety about AI belongs. The fear is not simply that machines will think for us, but that we might willingly stop thinking for ourselves; truly, isn’t that always the choice?

Shakespeare gave us “To thine own self be true.” Polonius may have been an imperfect messenger, but the sentence survived him. Know yourself. Examine yourself. Do not surrender your judgment merely because the world around you is shouting something louder.

Then there is another phrase from my era that I grew up with and love: face life with the eye of the tiger. Not, as I once thought, an ancient Indian proverb, but a line Sylvester Stallone carried with him long before Rocky. The image remains powerful to me: wake up alert, stay focused, and meet life with courage.

I picture Rocky climbing those steps…bloody and exhausted, hardly the person the world would have bet on, yet continuing anyway. Not because everyone believed he was enough, but because somewhere beneath the bruises, he still recognized himself. 

Maybe that’s grit and maybe being an apocaloptimist requires some of it.

My brilliant-minded friend, Edward, recently introduced me to Dennis Potter’s 1994 interview with Melvyn Bragg.  Nearing death from pancreatic cancer – he died two months later – Potter spoke about the plum blossoms outside his window with almost unbearable clarity. Knowing they would soon disappear did not diminish their beauty; it intensified it. He faced mortality without sanitizing it and famously paired morphine with champagne. There is something wonderfully defiant in that image: acknowledge what is coming and taste the champagne anyway.

I don’t want the kind of optimism that requires pretending everything is fine, nor the kind of cynicism that masquerades as wisdom. I want to see clearly and recognize what technology offers without handing it my autonomy.

I want to remember what old films can teach us about language, intimacy, restraint, and attention without romanticizing an era that had plenty wrong with it. And I want to acknowledge that every generation believes something precious is being lost, while remembering that something new is always being born alongside it.

The world will remain messy. There will always be naysayers. There will always be reasons to retreat, disengage, or surrender our agency. But there will also be blossoms. Progress will offer us things worth embracing and things worth questioning. Perhaps the task is not to choose between nostalgia and blind optimism, but to stay awake enough to know what deserves preserving, what deserves releasing, and what deserves our curiosity.

The blossoms are there all along.  The task is to notice them before life has to remind us that nothing lasts forever, and to drink the champagne anyway.