I’m an optimist. I almost have to be. Immigration is an act of optimism.

You leave behind your family, your language, your memories, and build a life where none existed before. No one makes that journey believing tomorrow will be worse than yesterday. I came to America in 1978, a young man from Tabriz, Iran, who took it for granted that the future was something you walked toward. I still take it for granted.

But I also see a country that has changed.

The America I arrived in felt more open. More confident. More willing to take a chance on a stranger. There was a sense, in ordinary life, that tomorrow could be better than today. We seem more guarded now. More tired. Less willing to believe the best is still ahead of us.

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I understand why, and I won’t pretend the worry is invented. We carry real fractures — in our politics, in our trust, in our sense of one another. I have written about them. Others have written about them with more authority and more grace than I can. None of that is my subject here, because, for once, I want to point out what is going right.

Consider what we have lived through in a single lifetime. Globalization. The digital revolution. The transformation of work. The largest expansion of opportunity for women in human history. No society absorbs that much change without recoiling from some of it. Every advance breeds its backlash. The question is not whether we are living through one. We are. The question is how long it lasts, and where to look for the answer.

I don’t look to politics. I look to culture because it made this moment and will carry us past it. Cultures are not machines that break. They breathe. Every generation pushes off against the one before it; the fever of the late 1960s gave way to a quieter, more private 1970s, and the country that had seemed to be coming apart went home and raised its children.

Right now, if you want to see the country the way a newcomer sees it, you only have to turn on a soccer match.

This summer, the United States is co-hosting the World Cup with Mexico and Canada — the largest in the tournament’s history, the first staged by three nations at once, and the first to field 48 teams. Last week, total attendance surpassed 3.6 million, the most the World Cup has ever drawn, breaking a record this country set in 1994. The fans have come from everywhere, including from places — Cape Verde, Curaçao, Jordan, Uzbekistan — whose flags had never been carried onto this stage before.

What strikes me is not the size of the crowd. It is what the visitors keep stopping to notice.

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They arrive with their phones, and they film the small things. The stranger who gives directions and then walks them halfway there. The man in the next seat shares his food because you are far from home. The cashier who says, unprompted, “Welcome — we’re glad you’re here.” They post these moments by the thousands, amazed, as though they had stumbled onto something rare. And watching them, I understand what they have found: the very things we have stopped seeing in ourselves. The newcomer’s eye is honest. It hands a country back to itself.

I was on the receiving end of that eye once. The first kindnesses shown to an international student with careful English were not policies or principles. They were a held door, a shared table, a name learned and remembered. That is the country the cameras are finding again — the one that was never actually lost, only taken for granted by those of us fortunate enough to live inside it.

What gives me the most hope is smaller still.

Ask people what shaped them. Almost no one names the easy years. They name the hard ones — the illness, the loss, the failure, the season that forced them to become someone stronger than they were. Rupture first, then repair. It is the oldest pattern we have, and it works on a culture exactly as it works on a person.

We are beginning to want repair. You can see it in the stories we reach for. We are drawn, lately, to the person who stays decent when cynicism would be easier — and we have stopped being embarrassed to admit it. We don’t admire that person because we think him naive. We admire him because he reminds us of who we still hope to be. A culture that is hungry for plain goodness is a culture turning a corner.

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We are not at the end of our troubles. But we may be nearer than we feel to the end of our despair.

An immigrant learns that optimism is not a mood. It is a decision made in the morning, remade at night, usually without proof and often against the evidence. You bet on the country because you have already wagered your life on it, and because betting against it improves nothing.

So I keep the bet. Not because America is easy, and not because the cameras flatter us, but because I once stood at the bottom of a life with nothing and watched it begin again, here. I know it can be done. And this summer, in stadiums full of strangers filming our smallest decencies as though they were wonders, the country is offering the rest of us the proof it once offered me.

The work from here is both simpler than we pretend and harder than we admit: to see what they see, and to live like people who still believe it.

S. Massoud Amin came to the United States from Tabriz, Iran, in 1978. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, where he held the Honeywell/H.W. Sweatt Chair in Technological Leadership, and is widely regarded as a founding architect of the modern smart grid.

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