Working toward our ideal: Pessimism won’t bring the change we desire
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It’s a beautiful world. The sky is blue and the birds are singing. Over 40,000 people have escaped poverty today. Global life expectancy has nearly doubled in the past 100 years. The world’s tree cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers — an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined — over the past 35 years. A deeper dive shows that the world is getting better in key indicators of quality of life. Yet, at the same time, major media outlets are displaying an increase of negative events.
We have naturally evolved as problem solvers by directing our attention toward negative aspects of our environment so that we can fix them and maintain a healthy survivability status. Studies show that negativity drives online consumption. There is an incentive for news corporations to display as much negativity as they can, irrelevant to the actual proportion these events occur. Just because that is the prerogative of the legacy media, does not mean that we should dwell on the dread and doom displayed to us.
A survey of college students found that around 41% of college students have symptoms of depression. The generation with consistent attention toward online media sources has aligned their emotions with the ever-profitable marketing tool of negativity itself. Nonetheless, we have a responsibility as adults seeking justice to work toward correcting misinformation and maladaptive thought patterns rather than accepting or spreading it.
Studies show that increased pessimism is associated with significantly more negative events, more negative cognitions and emotions, worse psychological adjustment and worse cortisol levels, independent of other life factors like socioeconomic status and health behaviors. Our perspective can positively impact others, and having more optimistic partners can uniquely predict better physical functioning and fewer chronic illnesses.
We owe it to ourselves and those around us to work toward a more optimistic perspective. Especially now that information can be disseminated freely through a wide variety of mediums, there is less of a reason to play the victim and blame major media corporations for their less-than-helpful coverage.
A previous column from The Daily Orange viewed pessimism as “dissatisfaction-fueled motivation” as a call to action. We do need to acknowledge negatives to functionally correct them, but that’s contrary to pessimism. Pessimism is an unconstructive process of acknowledging negative aspects but feeling hopeless and thinking nothing can be done. That can’t be considered “more productive”, as the column asserted.
The golden standard of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, supports the importance of challenging our negative thoughts, behaviors, and emotions rather than immediately giving in to them. We must still be realistic and rational with our thoughts to avoid toxic positivity. But exclusively dwelling on negative aspects of life won’t help anyone.
Seeing a recent uptick in mass shootings and just assuming that will continually increase without anything being done is part of a cognitive distortion known as a mental filter — focusing exclusively on negative aspects of a situation. While solutions seem to lag and some people work against progress, we could consider all of those working toward fixing this recent issue — such as Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions & The American Academy of Pediatrics — and consider the homicide rate is generally trending downward and is nearly half of what it was three decades ago.
Another cognitive distortion, idealizing comparison, involves overestimating positive aspects of other countries and underestimating the positive aspects of one’s own country. Instead of confirming the narrative that your country is much worse off than others, you could consider positive aspects of your country and explore the challenges and negative aspects of life in other countries for a more balanced and realistic perspective.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy also places a strong emphasis on behavior as a key component of mental health and wellbeing. We know that media sources are incentivized to share negativity irrelevant of the proportion it occurs, and indulging in this is shown to negatively impact mental health. We should set boundaries for the amount of time we spend consuming media, which includes choosing our sources wisely, being mindful of the sources we choose to follow and focusing on positive news for more perspective and potential inspiration.
People should find healthy and productive ways to deal with negative news, such as getting involved with those attempting to solve the problem or bringing light to situations you feel mainstream media is ignoring.
Joshua Goetz
