Everything seems to be going wrong.
Climate Change is real, Migration Politics is a mess, Wars are reappearing, Social Media is harmful, Media is not trust-worthy, AI is moving too fast, and we seem to be getting more and more polarized.
It’s not a scenario we want to be in. But it is the scenario we get to be in. For a generation that has to deal with problems we didn’t choose (and don’t know how to solve), it’s a heavy burden.
Here is how to deal with it.
Please note: this is not a piece arguing that every person is better off currently. There is no way to make justice to the millions of families worldwide suffering from wars, extreme poverty, natural disaster, authoritarian regimes, or famines. My intention is to reflect on humanity as a whole, and from a western-world perspective.
Remember that the bad is magnified
We always had a tendency to magnify what’s wrong. And, more importantly: we remember the bad, that which frightens us, more. This is what Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman called negativity bias.
Another factor is that we focus on immediacy, instead of reporting on general trends and numbers. By focusing on the morbid and recent event, we don’t get a real picture about the world. This plays into our recall bias, making us believe that a situation is much more common than it is, just because we can remember examples.
No matter the medium, negative headlines will attract more attention. And that’s what sells.
So we find ourselves in a situation where bad news are overrepresented, and give us a false sense of the world.
Know that a lot is better than it was
Numbers show that the last 100 years have brought positive change in almost all areas. Here are some examples:
- In healthcare, wherever you look, it’s massive improvements: life expectancy is up worldwide. It has doubled in the past 120 years, we’re now at 71 years on average. HIV incidence is down virtually everywhere, so is the Global Cancer Death Rate. Child Mortality, Maternal Mortality, Cardiovascular Disease Death Rate, etc… Advances in medicine have significantly improved all our lives. 1
- Air Pollution is down virtually everywhere, and the ozone layer is closing.
- Food Production productivity has improved, even if accounting for the population increase. There’s more available calories per person than ever before.
- There has never been a time in which any one individual had better access to more information. The internet is a massive improvement in our lives and collective/individual wisdom.
- Fewer people die in wars. Relationships between countries are getting better. And the conflicts that we’ve had in the last decades are less deadly than any of the World Wars (by a lot).
- Literacy keeps rising significantly, so do the people with access to electricity. And what about people with access to education?
Add to this the fact that most of us have much more liberty in all areas of life: what career we want to pursue, who to marry, if we want children, where we live, or what to eat.
When we look at measurements and trends, it’s difficult to argue for a better time to be alive. 2
Faith in humans
I know, I know. How can you trust other people? You can’t even trust yourself to do your new-years resolution for 3 weeks.
But, and this is an important but, we have an incredible capacity for evolution and development. The last decades have brought us advancements that would look like magic to anyone 100 years ago.
We’ve never been so many people, with this quality of tools, this much access to information, and so much room for cooperation as today. And, more people focus on the same problems. We are in good condition to solve the issues that we face, and there’s good people trying to solve them. 3
Human nature has not changed, and it won’t. Human nature has made us advance more than we ever dreamt was possible. History has shown us many stories of cooperation and solidarity, and it will continue to do so.
Plus, difficult times make good people.
Sanguine is crucial
Most people will either be paralyzed by fear, or move to extremes when faced with it. To get people moving into the right direction, we have to find a common consensus that the future can be bright.
The only real way forward is a sincere belief in things working out.
Don’t doomscroll
This one is straight to the point: the single action you can take today to improve both your present and future is to stop scrolling catastrophic news. You can catch up with the most important news at the end of the week and still be well-informed.
Your hunter-gatherer brain is not designed to get a constant flux of negative input like that. Stop harming yourself, and those around you.
Understand that uncertainty is part of live
There is a lot happening, and very quickly. The situations are complex and unique, and offer much room for disaster. There’s pressing issues that need to be discussed and faced. There are many things that we need to work on.
A lot will go south. We can’t grow and improve all the time. There will be hard times.
That’s what’s frightening. We see that things are changing rapidly, and we fear that it is in the wrong direction.
But hard times have always been part of life. Unimaginable challenges have been placed upon us. Human history is a constant struggle for survival.
So yes. There is a heavy responsibility put on our generation, and it’s likely to increase. It’s on us to accept it, and to trust in our ability to build a better future.
- One worrying measure is obesity rate, which has been consitently going up for the last decades. The numbers are worrying, specially for low-income families in developed countries. ↩︎
leo burghaus 
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