Time & Perspective Quote by Stanley Schmidt

Dystopia is cheap. Schmidt’s line lands because it calls out a habit that modern culture has quietly rewarded: we treat pessimism as a mark of sophistication. It’s “easy” to picture collapse because catastrophe has a thousand ready-made scripts - climate breakdown, political decay, surveillance tech - and because fear comes with built-in narrative momentum. A bad future writes itself. A better one requires design, tradeoffs, and the embarrassment of specificity.

The pivot in the sentence does the real work. “Harder, but more worthwhile” isn’t motivational-poster optimism; it’s a rebuke to passive doom. Schmidt isn’t denying danger, he’s challenging the aesthetic of despair: the way imagining the worst can feel like moral seriousness while demanding nothing beyond anxiety and hot takes. “Plausible” is the discipline word. He’s not asking for utopia. He’s asking for futures that survive contact with budgets, institutions, incentives, and human stubbornness - the unglamorous mechanics of progress.

Context matters: Schmidt is a science fiction writer and longtime editor, speaking from inside a genre that can either anesthetize readers with apocalypse or recruit them into problem-solving. The subtext is editorial as much as philosophical: stop mistaking bleakness for insight. If science fiction is a rehearsal space for society, then the hardest, most radical act is not predicting how things fall apart, but constructing scenarios where people build, govern, and cooperate imperfectly - and still bend the trajectory upward.