Negativity is [still] making everyone miserable

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People who are living in the United States of America in 2024 are living in what is indisputably one of the richest countries on the planet, at a time of unprecedented global prosperity.

And yet, even in a mass culture that’s increasingly consumed by questions of privilege, you rarely hear expressions of gratitude for the reality of that basic good fortune. It’s more common to hear expressions of apocalyptic levels of alarm about living in “a world on fire” or through a series of “unprecedented” traumas. This kind of relentless negativity reflects a kaleidoscopic series of political lenses. Those on the right, of course, want to emphasize the negative right now for partisan reasons. Many on the left also want to emphasize the negative, but to build the case for radical change. Meanwhile, in the sensible center, I think it’s considered cringe (and politically opportunistic) to tell the masses that they are wrong about anything. If the people are upset, only knee-jerk partisanship could be your reason for suggesting they should maybe take a chill pill.

But I think most upper and middle class Americans should, in fact, take a step back.

The world, including the United States of America, obviously has problems, and some things really are trending in a bad direction. And yet this has always been the case. The main thing that has actually changed is that the media landscape has become much more competitive and people (yes, people like you) prefer to click and share on negative stories. So a lot of people spend time doomscrolling, amping up negativity on their social media feeds to maximize engagement, and propagating a worldview that says the best way to be a good citizen is to engage in performative sobbing or raging.

This is all, I think, a mistake.

Trends are broadly positive and have been for a long time. Many bad things continue to happen, but that has always been the case, and problems can generally be solved more effectively by trying to slice them down into specific, narrow pieces rather than lumping everything together. Most negativity results from conscious or unconscious framing choices that compete evolutionarily in a “survival of the most downbeat” framework. The best thing to do to live a happily life is to feel like you are a person with agency and the ability to exert control over the world. And the best way to do that is not to tune out the problems of the world, but to cut down on the doomscrolling and try to think of specific ways you can take action to help with tractable problems.

A better world is not only possible, it’s something we are living through. But to make it even better, you need to do stuff, not talk about how bad everything is.

The art of the downer

On the level of raw political analysis, I basically agree with this recent Damon Linker article about Joe Biden’s political struggles. Democrats are, I think, a little myopically focused on checking the boxes of the groups’ agenda and not looking up from their work to notice Americans’ sense that they are living through chaotic times and that the government is not adequately delivering on the fundamentals.

But try to think critically about Linker’s list of examples that illustrate the “America is broken” thesis — it’s full of weird chronology-switching and contradictions:

The examples are almost too numerous to list: a disastrous war in Iraq; a ruinous financial crisis followed by a decade of anemic growth when most of the new wealth went to those who were already well off; a shambolic response to the deadliest pandemic in a century; a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan; rising prices and interest rates; skyrocketing levels of public and private debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border; spiking rates of gun violence, mental illness, depression, addiction, suicide, chronic illness and obesity, coupled with a decline in life expectancy.

That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years. Yet for the most part, the people who run our institutions have done very little to acknowledge or take responsibility for any of it, let alone undertake reforms that aim to fix what’s broken.

It’s true, for example, that we had a span of highly inegalitarian growth in the wake of the financial crisis. But how about more recently? In the current economic recovery, wealth has grown most rapidly at the bottom and so have wages.

Back when homicide was, in fact, surging in 2020-2021, I thought “things were worse in the 1990s” was a lame response. But we’re now living through the third straight year of falling murder, the drop appears to be accelerating, and the fact that the spike peaked at a lower level than we saw in my childhood does feel relevant to me. It’s not just that the murder situation is getting better, the overall policy feedback loop has improved — that, not “spiking rates of gun violence,” seems like the story to me.

Public debt has gone up, but private debt is at record low levels. Obesity is a genuine problem, but the rate has been rising as far back as we can find records (i.e., the 1880s and possibly earlier), so this is hardly a reason to feel like the world is suddenly in disarray. The actual big news on obesity is that we, for the first time ever, have a new class of drugs that appear to be highly effective in treating it. There are more GLP-1 agonists in development, and it looks like they have benefits beyond treating obesity.

Something that I do note about the GLP-1 drugs is that the media coverage of them has been oddly negative, almost obsessively focused on downsides, to the point that Rachael Bedard’s piece arguing that actually it’s good that we had a medical breakthrough on a serious problem counts as a contrarian take.

Similarly, while falling life expectancy has made a ton of news year after year, fewer people seem to have noticed that last fall, the CDC reported that life expectancy rose in 2022. What’s more, the data is laggy. But traffic fatalities fell last year for the second straight year. And we know that the murder rate declined in 2023 and that the Covid death rate also declined, so this fall when we get the 2023 life expectancy numbers, they will likely report another rise that again won’t get as much attention as the drop.

Problems just don’t get nearly as much attention when they are ameliorated. Or else time is warped such that somehow both the decision to invade Iraq four presidencies ago and the decision to end the war in Afghanistan during this presidency are the fault of the incumbent. It’s a well-constructed paragraph, but is it true? Is it reflective of reality? Or is it reflective of a hothouse media environment in which we’re bombarded with bad news?

Lots of stuff has gotten way better

The share of the world’s population that lives in extreme global poverty has fallen dramatically since I graduated from college. That’s happened even as global population has increased substantially, so the number of non-poor people has just absolutely surged.

If the numbers went the other way, I bet we would hear about it constantly. But since the news is good, it just kind of goes without much notice.

There’s a sense in many quarters that it’s bad or complacent to draw attention to this kind of good news, but I’ve always preferred Max Roser’s framework for looking at it: Simultaneous representations of progress and inequality underscore the fact that further improvements are possible.

But this is not the framework most activists and media outlets use.

Linker gave us a kind of centrist drumbeat of gloom. A leftist drumbeat would be different, likely more focused climate change. For years now, though, scientists have been popping up (here’s Scientific American in 2020, here’s New Scientist in 2023) to note that the worst case scenarios have become much less likely. Among technical specialists, the big argument, as far as I can tell, is that some people think those dire scenarios were always overblown, while others say they really were on the table 15 years ago and have now been avoided. I’m just a humble political pundit and can’t say which is correct. What I can say is that a lot of people used to spend a lot of time talking and worrying about these worst-case scenarios. They were considered a really big deal! But the good news today has been almost totally ignored.

My observation is that people tend to be conspiratorial about this.

Conservatives believe the good news on climate change is being covered-up by a leftist conspiracy, and progressives believe the good news on homicide is being covered-up by a rightist conspiracy. But the truth is that all good news on all subjects is covered-up by the exact same dynamic — it gets lower ratings and drives fewer clicks and shares than bad news.

And it makes everyone miserable.

Try to do something helpful

When something bad happens, some people naturally want to consume a lot of content about it. A neat study looked at what happened to people who watched lots of TV news in the wake of the Boston marathon bombing and found that it raised stress considerably. Not the fact of the bombing, to be clear, but the fact of consuming lots of media about the bombing.

Note that a key part of the doomscrolling dynamic is there was nothing useful or actionable in that marathon bomber coverage. It was a terrible crime. But the city and the state and the country survived intact; there was no ongoing crisis that people had to mobilize around.

And there are lots of studies showing similar effects. Consuming negative news in the morning impairs your job performance and leads viewers to catastrophize about their personal life. When news consumption makes you anxious, the natural response is to monitor the situation even more closely, which is good for ratings and engagement. This works, though, precisely because there is nothing you can do with the information. If you read on the internet that your neighbor’s house was on fire, you would (hopefully) not keep scrolling news about house fires — you’d call the fire department or put your shoes on and try to do something. Even if you can’t help with the fire itself, your neighbor might need some food or a spare jacket or a place to sleep. That’s good for the people you help, and it’s also good for your own subjective well-being to feel like you’ve accomplished something. But it’s bad for engagement.

A question that’s come up recently is why tragic deaths in Gaza attract so much more attention in the US than tragic deaths in Yemen or Chad a few years ago or tragic deaths in Sudan right now. One common claim is that because America is allied with Israel, this particular tragedy is something we’re more able to do something about.

But I think on some level, the opposite is true.

There are hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees living in Egypt in dire conditions, and UNCHR needs your money to help take care of them. You can turn money into lives saved very directly via GiveWell’s top charities fund. You can transfer cash directly to some of the poorest people in the world via GiveDirectly. The Israel-Palestine conflict is in a kind of discourse sweet spot where it relates to a lot of identity-linked issues that people feel passionately about but also has extremely low tractability — there isn’t much you, personally, can do about it except post, with the convention being that the more extreme your posts, the more it shows you care. This is, in a sense, convenient. You’re not challenged to put your own money on the line the way you would be if you chose to get invested in something else. But it’s psychologically disempowering and does little good for the world.

Climate has similar dynamics. Yelling that we need to “just stop oil” because “our government doesn’t give a fuck about its responsibilities” puts you way out there on the performative outrage scale.

But even though there’s a strong case for policy action on climate change, there’s also a lot that individuals can do here — in part because the way policy action works is that once the government commits to building out an EV charging network, it still needs people to go buy the electric cars. You can get solar panels on your roof. You can switch to a heat pump. You can eat less meat. If you want to dedicate your life to the cause and not just make petty consumer decisions, you can train as an electrician and literally do the work. If you’re a young and idealistic college student, you can try to gain the science and engineering skills necessary to make real contributions to battery research, carbon capture, industrial decarbonization or any of the many other fields that require more technical work.

It would obviously be a little silly for a person who makes a living writing about politics and policy to take the position that nobody should read articles about the world’s problems.

But I do think most people could stand to be more mindful about their consumption. Are you learning new information about a topic where you are open to changing your mind? Are you consuming content that is helping you make better decisions? Are you entertaining yourself, in the sense of genuinely feeling happier as a result of what you’re reading? Or are you just kind of marinating in ineffectual misery and performative position-taking?