Frustrated Idealist

"Inside every cynical person there is a disappointed idealist." - George Carlin

I get that a fundamental problem with being an idealist is that my aspirations for the human condition are no doubt unrealistically high but one might ask where those aspirations even came from. I think despite that which handicaps the collective human experience, the better angels of our nature have at least informed how I feel about where our future should be heading.

These days I'm buried under my own cynicism. Parents, religion, the political system, the economic system, people in general, throughout my 4 decades-plus of living in this paradigm I've lost the faith in pretty much everything and it's not like I haven't given it all a chance. Any aspirations I may have for my species has been tempered by so much reality, my dreams so compromised that I think the human condition is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. How sad that I'm often brought to the point where I ask, are we redeemable?