Why are we so pessimistic?

If you live somewhere that has always been pretty bad, then chances are, things are getting better, even if slightly. If you live somewhere, where things have always been generally good, it's likely that things are curtailing. Its brownian motion of societies.

Given that on average the people who most often discuss the state of being on social media and otherwise, are more likely to be in the second camp, it doesnt seem that surprising that the overarching sentiment is pessimism

I believe that pessimism is the greatest crisis facing humanity today. Yes, that includes climate change.

It's just not possible for a civilization to make progress if everyone believes that the future will be worse and it's not possible to avoid it.

That's not optimism. That's willful ignorance.

Humans have to assess all incoming information (gossip round the campfire, stirring in the long grass or twitter feeds) and aa strong bias to pay more attention to potential negatives in the environment will in general allow us to avoid disasters (like getting eaten)

In our evolutionary environments that would be balanced out by "good fortune" - a old tree has just produced fruit perhaps, so we would get our optimism reinforced as much as our pessimism.

But good fortune today is basically baked into life for most of the western world - starvation is rare.

In short what used to be good news (hey I got to eat today) is just normality and so that leaves just downsides (perhaps an analogy of a roller coaster with half of it underwater - being above water is taken for granted and so there is only dips down and long slow climbs back to normal.)

In short, we need to get a sense of perspective back. Social media is not making people worse - we just happen to have sight of every moron and pub conversation that has always been there but not aggregated and delivered in front of us.

Democracy is under no more threat than before - we have always had to fight for it - from Tammany Hall to Jarrow Marches and we shall have to fight again.

This time however we have human instinct on our side - this is our democracy and you can't take it.

There's really no such thing as pessimism. People can only be:

- realistic

- optimistic (a.k.a. delusional)