You’re sitting in your favorite café.
The kind with mismatched chairs and a shelf of lending library books near the door — dog-eared paperbacks, a few hardcovers with cracked spines, the occasional journal nobody claimed.
You’re not looking for anything in particular. You just reach out and grab something.
A book review. William James. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.
Published in 1907.
You start reading. And somewhere around the second page, you get that strange feeling — the one where someone who’s been dead for a hundred years is describing something you’ve been trying to articulate for the last twelve months.
The word is meliorism.
James positioned it as the third option — the one the culture never bothers with. On one side: optimism. Everything will be fine, don’t worry, it’ll work out. On the other: pessimism. Nothing matters. Entropy wins. Might as well not bother.
Meliorism doesn’t take either exit.
It says: the world can get better. But only if someone decides to make it better. Improvement is possible, not guaranteed. It requires you to show up and actually do the work.
That’s not a self-help slogan. It’s a philosophical position — one James argued for against the determinists and the fatalists of his time. The universe isn’t rigged toward progress. It’s not rigged against it either.
It’s just open.
I didn’t know the word when I registered the domain.
I didn’t have a philosophical framework in mind — I had a hunch. Something about using AI not to do things faster, but to become something more. More educated. More thoughtful. Better judgment. Sharper memory. The kind of person you always meant to be but life kept interrupting.
howtobebetter.ai started as a hunch that this was possible.
Meliorism is what that hunch turns out to be called.
James was writing in the aftermath of Darwin — a world where the old certainties had dissolved and nobody had replaced them with anything sturdy enough to stand on. He wasn’t offering comfort. He was offering a philosophy of responsibility.
The world isn’t going to improve by itself.
But it can.
And the can is on us.
Sound familiar?
The AI moment we’re living in has the same shape. Old certainties dissolving. Nobody knows what comes next. Two exits: everything will be fine, or we’re all doomed. Cable news sells one, tech Twitter sells the other, and neither of them is especially useful at 7am with a coffee.
Meliorism says there’s a third door.
It involves effort. It involves you.
One thing James didn’t quite anticipate — or maybe he did and didn’t say it out loud — is how easily ideas get picked up by people with different intentions than the originator. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a contemporary, took pragmatist logic and applied it to eugenics. If an idea is judged by its results, he reasoned, then we should engineer the results we want.
James joined the Anti-Imperialist League. He would have been appalled.
I think about that sometimes when I’m building tools meant to help people become better versions of themselves. The instrument doesn’t control who picks it up. The philosophy doesn’t guarantee the application.
Which is its own kind of responsibility.
A hundred and nineteen years ago, a philosopher in Cambridge named what I’ve been trying to do.
Better is possible.
But only if you do something about it.
