CEO Report: Hope, Pride, and Joy

Joe Fain  |  July 15, 2026

L

ast month, local sports, philanthropic, and corporate leaders partnered with Mayor Wilson to secure 1,400 World Cup match tickets for kids from across the community. Peter Tomozawa, who leads Seattle’s World Cup organizing effort, asked one of those kids what he thought of the experience. The boy did not talk about the goals, the player stats, or the stars on the pitch. He said, “I’ve never seen so many people so happy.” Peter was visibly moved just recounting the conversation.

A child in one of the most prosperous, most beautiful corners of the planet found mass happiness so unusual that it was the single thing he chose to report. We should ask ourselves why.

A New Strategy

I’ve been blessed to spend my professional career working on big issues, and when I believe our community is headed the wrong way my instinct has always been to sound the alarm, marshal the data, and raise awareness of the threat. But Seattle’s World Cup experience changed my mind about how to approach the greatest challenge we face. 

For decades, and with accelerating intensity, we have conditioned the public, and young people especially, to believe a set of grim propositions about the future. We are led to believe that the country is fundamentally flawed, our public and private institutions are irrevocably broken, our planet is dying, and jobs are disappearing. Each claim contains a grievance worth taking seriously, but the drumbeat of negativity has become an inescapable worldview for many.

Convince a generation that everything they would inherit is irredeemable and you do not produce reformers, you produce despair. 

Despair makes untenable and irrational ideas attractive simply because they are different. Worse yet, this perspective becomes tribal and self-sustaining. When things break in a way that reinforces our ideological flavor of pessimism, we get a hit of dopamine and a perverse satisfaction in seeing our beliefs validated. We have not made the case for what works, or for our obligation to improve it. We have simply told our kids and ourselves that nothing works, and nothing can.

The World Cup taught me less about any specific policy agenda than it forced me to rethink how we go about building our community. I’ve always believed that bad ideas were the enemy of good ideas. I see now that the deepest damage is done by cynicism, a failed but alluring philosophy. To course correct we need a new arsenal: Hope, pride, and joy.

Hope

At a lunch this week with a group of business leaders, one father described a conversation with his son, who was anxious about his coming graduation. He comforted his son saying he, too, was anxious when he graduated, but he knew his hard work and perseverance would pay off. 

“You don’t understand,” his son countered, “That’s not how any of us feel.” For too many young people, the game feels already decided: Between AI, housing costs, the jobs market, climate change, global conflict, and everything else, life is essentially over before it starts.

"You don't understand. That's not how any of us feel." — A Recent Graduate, Responding To His Father

Hope has to be built on evidence. In 1990, more than four in ten human beings lived in extreme poverty; today it is about one in ten. The cancer death rate has dropped 34 percent since 1991, and the U.S. murder rate is on track to reach its lowest level ever recorded. But, this is the world our kids are told to believe is beyond saving.

None of this erases how hard it is to be a new graduate right now. But, the story young people have been told about their prospects is far dimmer than reality. In the Federal Reserve’s most recent survey, the inflation-adjusted median net worth of families under 35 grew 143 percent in three years, the fastest of any age group. By the St. Louis Fed’s math, today’s young adults hold $1.35 in real wealth for every dollar baby boomers held at roughly the same age. They are starting to save for retirement earlier than previous generations, buying homes at a higher rate than millennials did at the same age, and are on track to be the best-educated generation in American history.

An honest accounting still requires admitting that some things really are harder, and our modern-day uncertainty is a thick fog that a person of any age has trouble piercing. But the trajectory of human experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been overwhelmingly positive, drastically eclipsing even the most optimistic expectations of those peering at the future through the fog of yesterday. Hope is simply the claim that the future responds to effort. The record says it still does.

Pride

I want to distinguish pride from pridefulness. Pridefulness is the boast, the, “I’m better than you.” Pride is the earned recognition that comes from innate character and hard work, what a community is entitled to feel when it has built something worthwhile.

Both ends of our politics have spent years diminishing it. One side treats pride in country or community as ignorance of its sins; the other treats our shared institutions with contempt. Between the two, the simple sentence, “We built something good here, and I am proud of it,” has become almost unsayable.

Say it anyway. 

Few places on earth have been more successful at creating an environment worth being proud of: The companies, the universities, the parks, the sheer concentration of human talent within a few miles on both sides of Lake Washington. Pride in that is the opposite of complacency. With pride comes responsibility: We come to expect that we deserve better, and the better we deserve becomes our duty to create and maintain.

Joy

Joy comes last because it is the piece that pulls the rest together. It is also the thing we keep being told we must be denied. From one direction we hear that Seattle is a communist hellhole; from the other, that the country is a fascist oligarchy. The two extreme narratives agree on nothing except the conclusion: You are not allowed to be happy here.

This Fourth of July, I heard from friends who felt that celebrating would betray their commitment to confronting the injustices that surround them. Whether around immigration enforcement, economic inequality, social injustice, or global crisis, this heavy weight of social consciousness extends well past one holiday. It pressures you into believing that experiencing joy while others suffer is a moral failure. Some pockets of our region have not given themselves permission to be happy without controversy for the better part of a decade.

Seattle showed up for the world this summer, and in doing so it showed up for itself. Hundreds of thousands filled downtown. Strangers stood shoulder to shoulder singing national anthems, their own and everyone else’s. The streets were clean and people felt safe. None of it happened by accident. The city set an expectation for itself, and met it. Joy and responsibility turned out to be the same project.

That is the key learning of the World Cup, and we should say unflinchingly: “We can have nice things.” We deserve a clean and safe city as a standing expectation, not just for a month of matches. And we should be honest about who pays the price when we lower that expectation. 
The most vulnerable among us are not served by our acceptance of graffiti, open-air drug use, or street crime; they live with the consequences. They are best served when those of us privileged with a voice are not intimidated out of using it, when we take seriously the responsibility to expect better for ourselves and our community, and when we preach the truth that every person in this city deserves it.

I am starting to believe joy is the most powerful tool we have against cynicism, because people, in the end, want to be happy. What the World Cup offered this region was permission to be happy in a place that truly deserves to be.

Which brings me back to the boy at the match who was awestruck by something that should be ordinary: The greatest disservice we have done to the next generation is to implant our anxieties upon them. We pat ourselves on the back for modeling intelligence, a strong work ethic, or a strident resistance to injustice. But what may matter most to the health of this country and its next generation is modeling optimism. Misery is not an antidote to suffering. 

Our region has earned the right to celebrate our achievements. We have earned the right to demand and then work towards a tomorrow that is even better than today. Maybe hope, pride, and joy will be the fuel for our next great accomplishments. 

— Joe Fain, President & CEO, Bellevue Chamber of Commerce