Reflections On Optimism

Keyana Sapp

Building Indigo - Reshaping the future of work with AI

Published Aug 25, 2021

The Scourge of Pessimism

Pessimism is rife in modern times.

When thousands in the UK were recently asked if they believe that the world is improving, only 11% said that they did.

Is this pessimism well founded? By the end of this essay, I hope to convince you that it is not.

3 reasons we're inclined towards pessimism:

1 - We are survival machines. Our minds are designed to constantly scan our environments for potential threats to our existence. In the environment of our ancestors, a jumpy nature was adaptive. We are descended from the most fretful humans of the past, not their daring cousins.

This selective pressure has produced a negativity bias - adverse events have a more significant impact on our psychological state than positive events. We feel negative events more intensely.

2 - Media institutions exploit our negativity bias. Both traditional media and social media use advertising as their dominant business model. As such, the key focus for media institutions is to maximise the number of eyeballs on their channels.

Since human beings are wired to have a more intense reaction to negative stimuli, it's no wonder that the trending stories on CNN or Twitter tend to be negative in nature. The proportion of negative to positive events portrayed in the media does not correlate with their prevalence in the real world.

3 - Bad news is sudden, good news is gradual. Floods, bombings, forest fires, school shootings… all of these things happen in a flash of horror. This makes for gripping news.

Consider that 100,000 people will be lifted out of absolute poverty today. Why are there no reports of that on TV?

Because it has happened, on average, every day for the last decade.

89% of people are pessimistic about the future because they are exposed to a snapshot of the world that does not remotely resemble reality.

Life on the Bright Side

I have no data to support this, but I believe that the epidemic of mental illness, suicide and drug abuse that plagues our times is in part due to the increasingly widespread adoption of a pessimistic worldview.

3 key psychological benefits of optimism:

1 - Experience more positive emotion. Optimistic people are happier because they imagine positive events more vividly and expect them to occur sooner. This boosts their feeling of anticipation, which is greater the more pleasurable the anticipated event. The more vividly we can imagine it, the more probable we think it is to happen, and this leads us to more positive feelings generally.

2 - Build better relationships. Pessimists, with their incessant complaints and unrelenting chip on their shoulder tend not to be the kind of people that others want to associate with. On the other hand, we love to be around people who make us feel good about ourselves and the world around us. Optimists excel at doing just that.

3 - Optimism and agency. Depression is often accompanied by a pessimistic explanatory style: we tend to blame ourselves for misfortune, believe it’s permanent, and believe it affects all areas of life. Depressed people exhibit learned helplessness, the feeling that they’re not in control of their lives.

In contrast, optimism brings a sense of agency and confidence, and with it, a lower likelihood of falling into a rut of despair and hopelessness.

Suffice it to say, when it comes to the goal of living a happy life, an optimistic outlook is a key prerequisite.

But so is an outlook informed by truth. Our optimism about the world must be based on a factful understanding of human progress. It must be based in reality.

Human Flourishing - Quantified

I want to present 15 global trends that completely blew my mind when I first encountered them.

But first... an admission.

I believed that my children would inherit a world that is far worse than the one I grew up in.

I held on to that belief for years... until I looked at the data on human flourishing.

An understanding of the facts relating to human progress over the last few decades completely changed my outlook on life. I'll present a few of those facts below (sources for each data point are available at the end of the essay - trust me, many are so unbelievable that you'll want to verify their accuracy).

I hope they shatter your pessimistic intuitions as powerfully as they did mine.

Global GDP per capita has increased from $445 in 1960 to almost $11,000 today. [1]
In 1910, 66% of the worlds population lived in absolute poverty. Today, only 8.6% do. [2]
Famines are non-existent outside of warzones and oppressive autocracies. [3]
Global tree canopy coverage increased by 2.24 million km² between 1982 and 2016. [4]
Global income inequality is falling year on year. [5]
In 1990, 47% of the world’s population lived in slums. That figure fell to 29% by 2018. [6]
In 1990 only 11% of seats in national parliaments were held by women. Today - 25%. [7]
In 1910, only 20% of the world’s population was literate. Today, over 90% are. [8]
Average years of schooling have increased from 2 years in 1930 to 9 years today. [9]
For every year that you’ve lived, average life expectancy has gone up by 3 months. [10]
Infant mortality has fallen from 64.5 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 28 today. [11]
Number of hours worked per year has decreased from 2,124 in 1950 to 1,732 in 2017. [12]
15.6% of the earth’s land and 7.6% of the world’s ocean is now protected for nature. [13]
Carbon emissions per dollar of GDP have reduced by 62% globally since 1990. [14]
Global cereal yields have increased from 1.4 tonnes per hectare in 1960 to over 4 today. [15]

If you believe like I did that the future will likely be a very bleak place, these trends should give you pause.

Humanity certainly faces grave challenges. I'm by no means advocating complacency.

But it's worth remembering that solutions to past challenges were provided by people intent on bringing their vision of a better future to life.