Unfounded Pessimism:  Avoid It!  

By Shlomo Maital

     The world is going to hell.  Right?  Climate crisis.  Russian war.  Disasters. Corrupt politicians. People cheat, swindle, steal, lie.  And it’s getting worse.

      According to Adam Mastroianni (Columbia U.) and Daniel Gilbert (Harvard), “Your brain has tricked you into thinking everything is worse”.  (New York Times, June 20).      

        First, the bad news.  They write: 

   “We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.”

     Next, the good news.  The pessimism is not justified.  It is not true.  “We also found strong evidence that people are wrong about this decline. We assembled every survey that asked people about the current state of morality: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” “Within the past 12 months, have you volunteered your time to a charitable cause?”,“How often do you encounter incivility at work?” Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time.

      OK.  So, if things are not so bad, and not getting worse – why do we think so?   Why are we pessimistic? The authors published a study recently in NATURE to explain it. *

     Two reasons.  First, “human beings are especially likely to seek and attend to negative information about others.”  That’s just the way we people are.  Alas.  Print, cable and social media amplify this; they are single-mindedly focused on terrible awful shocking ghastly news.

    Second, “when people recall positive and negative events from the past, the negative events are more likely to be forgotten.”  (p. 786). This biases our memories, to believe that things were much better in the past.

   So, friends,  no —  things are not going to hell in a handcart.  Things are not getting worse. People are not more corrupt, evil, selfish, egoistic, uncaring, cynical, awful.  Maybe they are actually a bit better than people once were. 

    And even if they are not —  if you believe they are,  you will be happier and far less despondent.  Because the narrative you choose will drive your frame of mind and your behaivor.

     Why be a pessimist?   It’s unjustified.  And it’s harmful.  Choose optimism.

* Mastroianni, Adam M., and Daniel T. Gilbert. “The illusion of moral decline.” Nature (2023): 1-8.