I never thought I was a pessimist

I listened to a podcast of "In Our Time" a few days ago. The show picks a topic and with Melvyn Bragg moderating a few academics discuss it in a language that ordinary people understand. This time the topic was "Victorian Pessimism" and they started it with a quote from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach".

I was shocked by how much that single stanza of a poem, written over 150 years ago could resonate with me today.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I feel like I am stuck in the same position where the new world is opening up before me and it should provide the promise of a better life. I just can't see that better life. With all the technological and scientific advancements that are happening I should be dancing on the rooftops singing the praises of this new world, but instead I am sitting at my computer wondering when the world is going to collapse around us.

i always thought I was an optimist, thinking that everything would work out in the end, but I think that I have to accept that I am a pessimist and the only joy I will have will come from my family and we need to work hard to pull ourselves through increasingly difficult times which will lie ahead.

The full poem

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.