Realistic Optimism: What Restructuring Teaches Us About Renewal

I have not stopped worrying about debt, private credit, or the obligations we are leaving to our children. My recent discussion of private credit and the test of repayment reflects those concerns. But identifying serious problems is different from concluding that nothing worthwhile can come next. If I call myself a realist, I should count our strengths as carefully as our liabilities.

Our stories offer a small reminder. Television can illuminate greed and institutional failure, but This Is Us, Ted Lasso, and Shrinking also make room for kindness, loyalty, and people trying to repair their mistakes. That does not prove that the country is healthy. To me, it suggests that decency still interests us—and that flawed people remain capable of doing better.

Realistic optimism is not a prediction that events will work out on their own. It is a willingness to see the difficulties clearly and still ask what we can build, preserve, or improve.

In my work with troubled companies, I encounter both businesses that have exhausted their options and businesses with useful products and capable people trapped beneath obligations they cannot support. The distinction matters. A bad balance sheet does not, by itself, tell us everything about what remains worth preserving.

The difficult meeting begins with questions that people may have spent months avoiding: What is the business actually worth? What can survive? Who will have to accept a loss? The answers can hurt. Yet agreeing on the numbers can also bring relief. People can stop defending incompatible versions of the situation and begin making decisions.

This is part of the argument behind my book, The Long Postponement. Postponing an uncomfortable conversation does not remove the obligation. It can consume the time and flexibility needed to address it. Use a cash-runway calculator to explore a simplified 13-week cash scenario and the effect of lower collections. It is a starting point, not a substitute for a detailed forecast or professional advice.

A country is not a company, and the comparison has limits. Still, I recognize the same temptation to delay an unwelcome reckoning. History gives us reasons to take danger seriously without assuming that a country's worst chapter must be its last. Recovery requires people to rebuild institutions, educate the next generation, and find ways to cooperate. I would rather we do that through practical reform than wait for catastrophe.

AI gives me reasons for both excitement and concern. It could help medicine and education, lower the cost of running a business, and put new capabilities within reach of a small company. It could also make deception easier, displace workers, and equip people who intend harm.

Those possibilities do not settle the question of how we should use it. Safeguards, accountability, and choices about who benefits remain human responsibilities. The promise matters most when it improves an ordinary life: a student gets help, a treatment works, or a business can afford to grow.

Owners and investors should also ask how productivity gains might improve employees' lives. A more capable economy is not automatically a more generous one. That depends, in part, on the arrangements we are willing to make.

Cooperation sounds easier when we discuss humanity in the abstract. In practice, it means working with people whose backgrounds, habits, and opinions differ from our own. A multicultural democracy asks us to keep treating those people as neighbors, including after we lose an argument or an election.

Speak Up for Justice is one encouraging example. It brings judicial and civic voices into a public conversation about judicial independence and why courts matter. To me, it illustrates what can happen when someone decides an institution is worth protecting and invites others to help.

Giving USA's 2026 report estimates that charitable giving to U.S. charities reached about $617 billion in 2025, a 3% increase after inflation. Education, health care, and human services are among the causes supported. Giving does not, on its own, resolve an unfair economy. But it is evidence of care that deserves attention alongside our accounts of selfishness and failure.

Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett's The Upswing traces America's movement toward greater cooperation and then back toward individualism. My conversation with Garrett on The Puck explored those themes. The question stays with me: what would it take to put more emphasis on our responsibilities to one another?

I believe in capitalism. I also believe that too much wealth is concentrated and that housing, medical costs, and inflation have made ordinary security harder to reach. Telling younger people to appreciate technological progress is not much of an answer if a home and a family feel beyond their means.

I would like more companies to offer employees meaningful ownership and a share of profits. People who help build a business should have an opportunity to build wealth with it. Where a viable operation changes hands because its balance sheet no longer works, there may be a chance to consider employee participation in the rebuilt business. This is an idea worth examining, not a promised result of restructuring.

The harder question is what owners and investors—including me—would be willing to give up. It is easy to describe someone else's obligations. It is more demanding to reconsider our own returns, compensation, or tax bills. A humane economy requires public policy, but it also requires fairer choices within individual businesses.

Beyond any one transaction, those of us with experience, resources, and relationships have a responsibility to open doors for the people coming behind us. We can make that commitment concrete:

• Mentor a younger colleague and help them find opportunities, not just advice.
• Support an organization doing work you believe in, and contribute some of your own time.
• Ask how employees can share in the value they help create.
• Face difficult conversations while there is still time to make useful choices.

I do not want the next generation to hear that we had a good run and they arrived too late. I want them to see us still learning, contributing, and changing. I intend to keep pointing out problems—and to keep helping where I can. That is the optimism I mean: not confidence that someone else will fix things, but a commitment to doing our part.