From time to time, people have compared me to the gloomy character “Eeyore” from the children’s Winnie the Pooh series, or to the character Joe Btfsplk in the L’il Abner comic strip—a guy who constantly has a black cloud over his head. I’m not uniformly gloomy, and it’s not as if I intend to be morose, but I seem to have a penchant for worrying about all the possible ways a situation may turn out wrong. A long-term friend has a more measured description: I’m a “contingency planner.”
As part of the lead-in to its chapter about the negativity instinct, Roslings’ book Factfulness shows a chart with the results of a survey done in 30 countries with a single three-option question: “Do you think the world is getting better, staying the same, or getting worse?”
In all 30 of the countries surveyed, the majority of respondents said the world was getting worse. (Not everyone in any country did, though—there are at least some incurable optimists out there.) Results ranged from nearly 90% who answered “worse” in Turkey to between 50 and 60% in Russia, with other countries, including the U.S., arrayed fairly evenly in between.
The Roslings go on to show sets of global statistics that nearly all point to considerable improvement in many areas of life over the past 200 years: extreme poverty has declined precipitously, life expectancy has more than doubled, health and wealth in most countries have improved greatly. We tend to overemphasize the negative because it is “dramatic.” Good weather, good deeds, good fortune can get taken for granted. We’re more likely to pay attention when something goes wrong.
So what can we do to counteract the negativity instinct?
Hans Rosling’s response is to use a “both/and” approach. As he meditates on the issue, he decides: “The [or ‘a’] solution is not to balance out all the negative news with more positive news. That would just risk creating a self-deceiving, comforting, misleading bias in the other direction. It would be as helpful as balancing too much sugar with too much salt. … I am saying that things can be both bad and better. … Does saying ‘things are improving’ imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better.”
So, the next time someone accuses you of being unnecessarily negative, remind yourself that contingency planning can be valuable. Most aspects of life are a combination of “bad” and “better.” Then take that next breath and figure out what you may be able to do to improve some small part of what strikes you as bad.
Jinny's Occasional Poems 