“How can I stay optimistic despite the torrential digital downpour of negative news 24/7?” many people ask me. Let’s consider how we become pessimistic while reading the news.
Why do we become pessimistic while reading the news?
Source: Francisco De Legarreta C. / Unsplash
“If It Bleeds, It Leads”
Many people feel that the negative orientation of the news has, if anything, become more negative in recent times. Why? It’s likely because vitriol and incivility tend to be the most significantly rewarded messages on social media.
A University of Winnipeg study that analyzed every single tweet posted by members of the U.S. Congress between 2009 and 2019, for instance, found that when they express more negative incivility toward others on social media, they receive more likes and retweets than when they post positive comments lauding their followers.
Supporting this finding, a New York University study that analyzed more than 2.7 million Facebook and Twitter posts found that negative, hostile messages are twice as frequently shared or retweeted than positive or neutral messages.
And while the if-it-bleeds-it-leads content of the news is arguably worse or, at best, hasn’t changed, the frequency with which we read the news has. Why? We now access the news 24-7 from our devices, continually filling ourselves with foreboding and dread. The news—whether in television, print, or online form (name your poison)—often feels like one long doom scroll.
A Toxic Cocktail: Too Much Focus on (Negative) News
If you haven’t guessed by now, this combination of highly negative news stories and more frequent perusal of such stories do not coalesce into a heartwarming, glowing influence on your long-term well-being. What, then, can you do in these times?
First, remind yourself of these two truths:
- These times are challenging and uncertain.
- All times are challenging and uncertain.
So much negativity to read, so little time
Source: Roman Kraft / Unsplash
Second, question how you are interpreting the news vis-à-vis your inexorably repetitive sips from the digital trough. Research by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has found that life, in many ways, has never been better: despite some sensational mass shootings and the horrific wars in Israel/Palestine and Ukraine, there is less overall violence than there ever has been in our brief human history.
Focus on Progress
Let’s consider how we’re doing in two important areas of how we emerge and are often perceived as individuals in our collective society: race and gender. While 25 percent of people of color in the United States have been subjugated to a racist joke in their career, what percentage of people of color do you think were subjected to a racial insult a century ago in a single week of their career?
While there is still a gender pay gap in the United States (women earn about 82 cents, on average, to every dollar earned by a man) there is evidence from a recent study by Stanford University economist Valentin Bolotnyy and Harvard economist Natalia Emanuel that this pay gap is erased among men and women without children.
There are other signs of gender-related optimism: The percentage of managers in the United States who are women nearly doubled between 1990 and 2011, from a quarter (26.1 percent) to half (51.4 percent) of all managers. Forty percent of private businesses in China are now owned by women.
It doesn’t end there. For every two men graduating from university worldwide, there are now three women. Three in five master’s degrees are now conferred to women.
If Not You, Who?
It’s true that a lot is still left to be done. Yet it’s also true that a lot has already been done, and we can build on it.
Perhaps most importantly, what will your contribution be? Let’s all be optimism-leaning realists and garner enough hope to inspire us to do our part to create a better, healthier society for all of us who share this planet.
