Human beings are wired to be fearful. Let’s talk about the evidence for optimism.
We’ve been programmed by millions of years of evolution to pay more attention to potential and perceived threats than to actual, real benefits. As a result, many people live with and suffer from unnecessary fear and anxiety. As the evolutionary science writer Matt Ridley explains in his book The Rational Optimist, “There is immense vested interest in pessimism… No journalist ever got the front page by telling his editor that he wanted to write a story about how disaster was now less likely. Good news is no news, so the media megaphone is at the disposal of any politician, journalist or activist who can plausibly warn of a coming disaster. As a result, pressure groups and their customers in the media go to great lengths to search even the most cheerful of statistics for glimmers of doom […] Apocaholics (the word is Gary Alexander’s—he calls himself a recovering apocaholic) exploit and profit from the natural pessimism of human nature, the innate reactionary in every person. For 200 years pessimists have had all the headlines, even though optimists have far more often been right.”
Fortunately, evolution has also bestowed upon us a large neocortex and prefrontal lobe that allows us to override our reptilian brain’s natural tendency to fearfulness. We can choose to ignore the apocaholics and disasterizers and pay attention to the positive, because guess what? The world almost certainly isn’t coming to an end in the foreseeable future, and isn’t even in decline as the prophets of doom have been predicting and claiming in every previous generation for all of recorded history and always, in the long run, been wrong. Let’s use these ginormous brains to discuss the mounting evidence that, even though bad things do still happen, in general things are getting much better for more and more people all the time.
With this in mind, I’ve started an Apocaholics Anonymous group on the meditation app Insight Timer… Join us there and use it as a forum for daily gratitude practice on all the ways things are getting better, big and small, or to share concerns you have in a particular area, and talk about how current problems fit into the broader trends of general improvement. Or join the discussion here. We welcome deep exploration of complex subjects, and the real understanding and genuine appreciation to which it leads. No subject is out of bounds for honest, open, respectful discussion, but be prepared to back up your position with solid evidence and sound reasoning, or to keep an open mind on topics about which you don’t have a settled view. That said, there will be a zero-tolerance policy for bullying or trolling, so personal attacks or passive-aggressive b.s. will be removed, as will those who posted them, and we will gleefully enforce Insight Timer’s community guidelines that celebrate and encourage diversity… The only thing we won’t tolerate is intolerance simply because someone is different, particularly in ways that are unchosen or otherwise morally irrelevant such as race, gender, sexuality, age &c.
If you are a recovering apocaholic, here are some more books you might want to check out in addition to Ridley’s:
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Swedish statistician Hans Rosling
Energy and Civilization: A History, by Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst Vaclav Smil
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World, by popular science author and media theorist Steven Johnson
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by the Harvard cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, and The Future is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives, by Greek-American engineer, physician, and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and science/technology and sports journalist and flow expert Steven Kotler
If you have a suggestion for other books you think everyone should read to really understand how the world works, where we came from, how we got to where we are now, and where we’re headed, please post about it and I can add them to this list! I would like to make it a growing, continually updated resource for those who no longer believe in the face of all this continually mounting evidence to the contrary that the world is going to hell. Happy reading, and I’m looking forward to getting to know you and discussing these ideas!
