Several of you have written that you’ve never been so pessimistic about the future. I hear much the the same from colleagues, friends, and students.
There’s lots of bad news, to be sure. But compared to other years and times — the Trump years, the Nixon years, the carnage of Vietnam and the assassinations of 1968, the Great Depression and World War II — we’re not really in such terrible shape. And as Max Fisher pointed out in the Times last week, in many respects the world is far better: War is rarer today than it has been for most of the past fifty years — and, when it does occur, is significantly less deadly. Genocides and mass atrocities are less common. Life expectancy, literacy and standards of living have all risen to historic highs; hunger, child mortality, and extreme poverty have all declined.
Yet these trends are worldwide; they’re not about America. Survey after survey has found majorities of people in low and middle-income countries to be optimistic about the future, for both themselves and their societies. But these same surveys find the residents of wealthy countries like the United States pessimistic about the future.
Why? Part of it is economics. People in low-income countries believe they’ll be better off in the future because they’re so much better off than they were just a few years ago, and they naturally extrapolate the trend. On the other hand, Americans and the inhabitants of other wealthy countries are not much better off than they were ten or twenty years ago, so they consider it unlikely that the future will be rosier.
But I suspect what gives the current moment its particular awfulness is our sense of powerlessness over many of the problems we’re experiencing. Problems we think we can do something about — even if they require huge effort — are easier to abide than problems we feel helpless to address. Helplessness can be crushing. It’s particularly insidious because it can turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy.
A third aspect of the current pessimism is the sheer number of problems that seem to be bombarding us at the same time. There are so many simultaneous crises that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
Which prompts me to ask this week’s Office Hours question: If you were president, of the many problems facing America right now, which would you be focusing on and why? (Don’t feel limited by the problems I’ve listed in the poll).
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