A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. (Berlant 2011)

The late Lauren Berlant wrote that a relation of cruel optimism exists when the thing you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. The object of desire doesn’t have to be obviously bad for you. Berlant says that the attachment feels entirely reasonable, even necessary. You reach toward the thing because you believe it will deliver you to a better version of yourself, or a better version of your circumstances. The cruelty is not in the thing itself but in the structure of the attachment: the way the object promises more than it can give, and the way that promise keeps you suspended in a relation that costs you more than you realise.

Perhaps peer review  – or rather, what many of us want from peer review  – is a textbook case of cruel optimism.

A submission fantasy?

What do we believe, or half-believe, when we submit a piece of writing for peer review? 

We submit hoping not just for acceptance but for recognition. We want the reviewers to see what we were reaching for. We want them to confirm that the argument holds, that the theoretical move was worth making, that we have earned a place in the conversation. For doctoral and early career researchers who still acutely feel the imposter-adjacent vertigo of being new to this, peer review can become a fantasy of legitimation. Many more experienced researchers feel this too.

But on another level we all know peer review is a quality assurance mechanism, a gatekeeping process that is imperfect, inconsistent, shaped by reviewer fatigue and disciplinary politics and the sheer randomness of which two or three people happen to be available on any given Tuesday. We know this intellectually. And yet the emotional practice of submission tells a different story.

And then the email saying R&R arrives and we feel – OK. Slightly irritated or bummed but we can move forward. A rejection arrives and we feel something much closer to identity fracture than professional disappointment.

This is the structure of cruel optimism. We have inadvertently attached our sense of scholarly becoming to a mechanism that was never designed to deliver it.

What peer review is

Peer review is a structured conversation about whether a piece of work is ready to join a particular conversation in a particular venue at a particular moment. That is a Valuable Thing. A good reviewer will identify major deficiencies your literature review, flag where your methodology needs tightening, point out where the argument loses its thread. These are real gifts, even when they sting. The review process, at its best, makes work better.

But look how much it cannot do. It cannot tell you whether you are a good scholar. It cannot certify your intellectual worth. It cannot resolve the anxiety that sits underneath the submission, the anxiety that says maybe I don’t really belong here. And it cannot, despite what the fantasy tells us, inaugurate us into scholarly identity. That work happens elsewhere, in the slow accumulation of reading and thinking and writing and teaching and talking with colleagues who take your ideas seriously.

When we ask peer review to carry all of that, we are asking it to do what Berlant’s cruel objects always do: to be both the promise of the good life and the means of arriving there. And the problem is not that the promise is malicious. It is that the promise, by its very structure, keeps us in a relation of waiting, of suspension, of measuring our worth against verdicts that are at best partial and at worst arbitrary or destructive.

Realism as self-care

Being realistic about peer review is not cynicism. It is not the weary shrug of someone who has stopped caring whether their work is good. It is, rather, a refusal to let the attachment become the obstacle.

What does being realistic about reviews look like in practice? It means submitting work you already believe in, rather than work you are sending out to find out if it is any good. The reviewers are not oracles. They are readers. If you do not yet trust your own argument, no amount of external validation will settle that distrust, and rejection will confirm it in ways that are hard to recover from. Get the work to a point where you can defend it, where you can say: I know this argument, I know its limits, I know what it is doing. Then send it.

It means building a relationship with revision that is not organised around the emotional economy of the verdict. The R&R is not a reprieve. The rejection is not a sentence. Both are, at bottom, information . And information can be evaluated, sifted, accepted or respectfully set aside. Some reviewer feedback is brilliant and should change your thinking. Some reviewer feedback reflects a different theoretical tradition and is simply not your conversation. Some, as we all know, is just downright rude. Learning to tell what is useful is one of the more sophisticated skills of scholarly life, and you cannot develop it if you are in the grip of a fantasy that the reviewer is the arbiter of your worth.

And this means, perhaps most importantly, cultivating sources of scholarly nourishment that peer review cannot provide. The colleague who reads your draft at the uncomfortable stage and responds with genuine intellectual engagement. The seminar where someone pushes back hard and you find yourself thinking more clearly than you did before they pushed. The moment of writing when the argument suddenly coheres, when you feel the thing click into place, independent of any external validation. These are the experiences through which scholarly identity actually forms. They are not glamorous. They do not go on a CV. But they are the substance of a flourishing research life, and peer review – for all its value – cannot substitute for them.

Giving up the fantasy but not the work

Berlant is not arguing, in the end, that we should abandon our attachments. Her point is more than that. She argues that we need to examine the structure of the attachment, to ask what we are really hoping the object will deliver, and to reckon with what it costs us to keep hoping in the way that we do.

Peer review is worth doing IMHO. Getting good at responding to peer review is a skill worth developing. Publishing in well-regarded journals in your field is worth pursuing. None of that is the problem. The problem is the fantasy that runs alongside all of it: the idea that the acceptance will finally make us feel like scholars, that the right review from the right journal will settle something that peer review was never equipped to settle.

Giving up that fantasy does not mean giving up ambition. It means redirecting energy away from waiting, and back toward the work itself . And the work is where the flourishing was, and is, always going to come from.