By Matthew Yglesias: Negativity is making everyone miserable
The point of my chapter, "Very Little Really Matters," in which I quote ... Matt Yglesias.
excerpts (from Matt's new piece, not Losing, although it could be!):
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. ...
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 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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
Problems just don’t get nearly as much attention when they are ameliorated. ...
[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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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?
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