This piece, from the summer, still strikes me as very apt for the New Year.

Fashionable fatalism is an easy thing for an academic to engage in, because we are educated to have critical minds, and identify problems, much more readily than we are taught to propose solutions. Because the virtues of the self-critical mindset are so embedded in our disciplines, and because leaping hubris is typically a much more common human problem then pessimistic paralysis, we don’t do much to confront the latter, in our seemingly endless campaign against the former. The problem is, however, when there are large scale pressures that induce many people to feel despair; at those moments, our skepticism is an in-apt tool, and prone to get in the way. This is all about the characteristic deformations that academics unconsciously habituate themselves into.

Personally I find success worth pondering, because it will bring its own challenges to humans to consider. This piece makes clear that there's a lot of evidence that things are indeed "getting better".  This piece is a bit more polemical, but makes the same point.

We live in an age where apocalypticism is very cool, where pessimism seems not only intelligible but perhaps a little bit de rigueur, where hope is what suckers seem to possess.  I appreciate the cautions, but my disposition is otherwise.  I suspect the apocalypticists are more than a bit like the people in Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," a poem everyone should read and remember. 

Whatever our projects, we should never not be pondering, at least a little bit, what to do if we win.