PS: The reason most news about the world is negative is not that bad events occur rapidly while good ones progress slowly (a dubious claim in its own right, imho). Rather, it lies in the media’s focus on processing bad news to cater to our ancestral hunger for threat signals. This predisposition was extremely advantageous when we lived in caves, facing constant and sudden survival risks; our hypothalamus and amygdala remain tuned to that environment.
Started working at Gayes foundation and their motto is Optimists on a mission. It is easier when there are resources and influence to do something. There are too many things that seem impossible to change and culture and politics that seem to inevitably directed to make the future worse and not better.
Optimism needs community and purpose to feed it and keep it alive.
Thank you, Dr. Ritchie, you've become indispensable to the data-driven. I find no fault with your numbers. Yet the subjective contrast between my own circumstances and the state of the world, isn't all that mysterious!
I'm a white, male, educated, middle-class, senior US citizen, in reasonable health and comfortably retired from working for a living. I acknowledge things are pretty good for me right now. I'm acutely aware, however, that I can take little if any credit for my good fortune. I could just as well say luck made up for my poor choices! And people like me are a minuscule minority in the world: maybe around 8 million, out of 8 billion. I don't feel somehow entitled to be at the apex of social privilege, and I'm glad global economic and technological development have reduced the number of people living in hunger, illiteracy and ill health in the last 50 years, even as our total numbers doubled.
But: large numbers of our fellow humans are still living on the edge of disaster, victims of routine persecution, war and weather; and old obstacles to progress like racism, misogyny, religious fanaticism, and class conflict are waxing under global anarchic capitalism, together with average lifespan and per-capita GDP. Some pejorative trends in pollution, economic inequality and authoritarian oligarchy, are conspicuous. These are all outcomes of contingent cultural evolution in a growing human population. The approach of peak population this century will mean profound changes for ensuing generations, which I decline to predict as I have no ensuing generations myself. Overall, I'm simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic about the future of the world. Who isn't?
Subsequent cultural evolution depends critically on humanity's collective choices. History shows that some early cultures resisted patriarchy, social hierarchy and top-down governance for varying lengths of time before succumbing. This at least demonstrates the possibility the whole world can do so again! I admit it seems unlikely, but I can't be sure it won't, in some future time frame.
On The Other Hand, as I type there's is a big metaphorical cloud darkening even old white male American skies: climate change due to anthropogenic global warming, the biggest tragedy of the commons in history, a recently recognized (https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm) consequence of the global "free" market's ancient propensity to socialize every transaction cost it can get away with. Global mean surface temperature is currently rising at over 0.2°C per decade. It's already costing people their homes, livelihoods and lives around the world, and is almost certainly accelerating as CO2 emissions continue unabated.
But GMST probably isn't rising as fast as it would if not for certain meliorative technological and political trends already evident. Just how tragic global warming ends up being, will be largely determined by future collective choices to take the profit out of selling fossil fuels, along with a big dose of luck. I remain hopeful despite recent electoral setbacks. What, me worry? It's only my problem for a couple of decades longer!
Mal, Hits very close to home. It is no wonder you and I agree on so many things. I have decided to try and take my efforts to inform and persuade to the next level by launching my own platform, https://justdean.substack.com . It is part of the reason I started using my real name instead of the pseudonym, Just Dean. Please check it out if you are interested.
Dean, I took a look at your substack, and liked what I saw. I couldn't find anything to argue with! Nor do you take feedback from readers, it appears. I enjoy the interaction with other commenters on the fora you and I both frequent: not just the substantive dialogue, but the gleeful troll whacking too! I find I don't need my own substack to do that, however. As much pushback as I get here, I strongly doubt anyone will click away for my random unprompted utterances. And I apologize for not following you. I've got too much virtual clutter in my life already, I'm afraid. I'm happy to trade likes with you, however 8^)!
I wonder if part of this disconnect is also shaped by worldview. Many people are raised with narratives in which ultimate responsibility for the world doesn’t rest with humans alone. If large-scale outcomes are seen as governed by forces beyond us, it’s easy to feel optimistic about one’s own life while remaining pessimistic about collective action.
I've often said I was born at just the right time. I've also had reason to look back on the past decade and think it was an especially good one, for me. I always feel I have to acknowledge that not everyone had a good pandemic and many people have lived through war and other tragedies. That's how I also explain the numbers below. Even people that had a good year are sympathetic to those that didn't.
"For example, 85% of the French said it was a bad year for France, but only 45% said it was bad for them."
Not gonna lie: this comes across as rather condescending. You assume I don't know these things?
My original comment was on Antoine's astute observation that what people say in studies differs from what they actually do. But it seems you have a book about the Tragedy of the Commons to sell.
I apologize. Nothing personal, you merely presented a target of opportunity 8^}. I agree that if enough people internalized their social costs, those costs wouldn't have be paid for by everyone else. I don't have any books to sell.
As you're aware, however, you're not my only audience. I'm looking at common-pool resource tragedies like anthropogenic global warming from an economic and therefore political perspective. What I'm trying to 'sell', if you will, is democratic collective intervention to decarbonize the US economy, which needs only about 1.5% more votes than it got in 2024. If I were literally selling something, I'd be more polite!
I see these numbers as making sense for two reasons. For the collective pessimism, I pin this on the 24/7 news cycle that focuses on the bad news for the simple reason that it brings in the audience. Crime, natural disasters, etc. always happened, but we didn't have 24-hour cable news and computers 50 years ago to continually push the bad stuff. As for the personal optimism, for most of us, societal problems aren't problems at all until they hit home. It's like the old saying that the economy is in a recession when your neighbor loses his job, but it's a depression when you lose yours.
Better play "It's the End of The World as We Know It (and I'm feeling fine)"
A couple of points to add to the mix:
- it's been shown somewhere that social media gives people an exaggerated sense of crime and disaster ongoing in their neighbourhood, as social media algorithms know what people's subconscious minds tend to focus on. This results in parents restricting their children's movements and unsupervised play. Referenced by Jonathan Haidt recently if you're looking for the source.
- another point without a reference but it was probably Daniel Kahneman - people's subconscious minds have a good grasp of the extent of the commons available to them. As primitive societies, whole tribes could migrate somewhere new and unsettled. We could rely on gathering resources from the wilderness. As we become more and more aware of how humans have changed the planet, we register subconsciously how much more limited our natural fall-back options and escape routes become. This accounts for the societal pessimism since the time of Socrates, as the ancient Greeks ravaged their environment.
I do wonder exactly what populations these surveys are trying to sample. In political polling, the goal is to get a representative sample of registered voters or likely voters. Is the goal here to get a representative sample of all adults? If so, how do they reach people near the bottom of the economic ladder who might be homeless, or disabled, or illiterate, or in prison?
“The greatest threat to the world economy is now a politics shaped by pessimism itself,” writes The Economist in its January 2026 editorial, “Pessimism is the world’s main economic problem.”
The warning echoes the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025, which listed declining societal optimism as one of the five greatest threats facing the world.
Oh dear ! Desperation indeed ! Fancy quoting ANYTHING from The "World Economic Forum" Victor ! They are the promoters of pessimism personified !
They MUST RANK as NUMBER ONE on the list of Global Risks Report 2025, which listed declining societal optimism as one of the five greatest threats facing the world !
A fanatical conglomeration of "wanna-be-rulers" and neo-Marxists , emulsified by their wealth and ambition , co-operating now BUT each hoping to out-smart the other in the final analysis
and seize the reins-of-power once they have wrecked the current 'world order' , destroyed the democracies , Capitalism and it's financial structures and it's institutions and demoralised the people sufficiently that they are AGAIN willing to "try communism" as a last-resort.........while they fly around in their personal , private jets living high-on-the-hog and amusing themselves playing 'one power group' off against another ', so that they 'self-destruct' and the WEF are left supreme and unchallenged in charge of the chaos they originally 'kick-started' and created !
The Davos Deviants ! What a wonderful coagulation of megalomaniacs , sociopaths and psychopaths ! No thanks Victor ......they are all yours ! Open your eyes man !!!
Victor....I apologise to you if you thought I was deriding you ! I was deriding your source of information ! The WEF is exactly what I described them as , but you can also add HYPOCRISY to their lack of virtues ! The CHAOS and THE PESSIMISM are largely a result of their activities , so , I suppose that they are the experts in that field........and like Konstantin Kisin says of the Muslims who say they HATE ISLAMIC EXTREMISM "We should take them at their word" and insist that they ACT ACCORDINGLY !
Again.....apologies to you and Hannah for my reaction ! Regards , Trevor.
No need to apologise... I read very widely in my research on optimism - last month I got attacked from the other side for quoting the new American Security Strategy on the need for optimism.
Great piece Hannah, especially in the very unmerry month of January.
I'd be really interested to know not just the average ratings of people's report sense of well-being, but also the distribution, and whether that is changing over time. It might be that the average holds up, whilst becoming more polarised. It wouldn't be irrational for people to feel that the world is getting worse if the proportion of people reporting very low well-being is increasing, even if that is compensated for numerically by increased happiness amongst other people.
Todd Rose’s book Collective Illusions (and his work on private opinion surveys more broadly) offers some additional perspective here. Beyond the factors described in this article, Rose argues that our general sentiments about the state of the world are shaped by what we think OTHER people think more than anything else. More troublingly, those same sentiments tend to shape our actions, or lack thereof.
What about response bias? People in poverty and other bad situations tend to be hard to reach with surveys. That could partly explain why individuals who did the survey are happier than they believe the average to be.
I wish they’d surveyed people like me. I’m definitely not ok or optimistic. I do know many people in Europe and they ARE ok. Half of Americans are completely screwed. Did they talk to anyone like me at all, or only the upper class?
Seems like the massive gap on immigration ties into how it's been the main drum the right-wing press has been beating lately. "It doesn't matter to me, but where there's so much smoke there's got to be fire, so I guess it matters a lot to the country".
SUPERB (AND TIMELY…) PIECE!!!
PS: The reason most news about the world is negative is not that bad events occur rapidly while good ones progress slowly (a dubious claim in its own right, imho). Rather, it lies in the media’s focus on processing bad news to cater to our ancestral hunger for threat signals. This predisposition was extremely advantageous when we lived in caves, facing constant and sudden survival risks; our hypothalamus and amygdala remain tuned to that environment.
Started working at Gayes foundation and their motto is Optimists on a mission. It is easier when there are resources and influence to do something. There are too many things that seem impossible to change and culture and politics that seem to inevitably directed to make the future worse and not better.
Optimism needs community and purpose to feed it and keep it alive.
Thank you, Dr. Ritchie, you've become indispensable to the data-driven. I find no fault with your numbers. Yet the subjective contrast between my own circumstances and the state of the world, isn't all that mysterious!
I'm a white, male, educated, middle-class, senior US citizen, in reasonable health and comfortably retired from working for a living. I acknowledge things are pretty good for me right now. I'm acutely aware, however, that I can take little if any credit for my good fortune. I could just as well say luck made up for my poor choices! And people like me are a minuscule minority in the world: maybe around 8 million, out of 8 billion. I don't feel somehow entitled to be at the apex of social privilege, and I'm glad global economic and technological development have reduced the number of people living in hunger, illiteracy and ill health in the last 50 years, even as our total numbers doubled.
But: large numbers of our fellow humans are still living on the edge of disaster, victims of routine persecution, war and weather; and old obstacles to progress like racism, misogyny, religious fanaticism, and class conflict are waxing under global anarchic capitalism, together with average lifespan and per-capita GDP. Some pejorative trends in pollution, economic inequality and authoritarian oligarchy, are conspicuous. These are all outcomes of contingent cultural evolution in a growing human population. The approach of peak population this century will mean profound changes for ensuing generations, which I decline to predict as I have no ensuing generations myself. Overall, I'm simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic about the future of the world. Who isn't?
Subsequent cultural evolution depends critically on humanity's collective choices. History shows that some early cultures resisted patriarchy, social hierarchy and top-down governance for varying lengths of time before succumbing. This at least demonstrates the possibility the whole world can do so again! I admit it seems unlikely, but I can't be sure it won't, in some future time frame.
On The Other Hand, as I type there's is a big metaphorical cloud darkening even old white male American skies: climate change due to anthropogenic global warming, the biggest tragedy of the commons in history, a recently recognized (https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm) consequence of the global "free" market's ancient propensity to socialize every transaction cost it can get away with. Global mean surface temperature is currently rising at over 0.2°C per decade. It's already costing people their homes, livelihoods and lives around the world, and is almost certainly accelerating as CO2 emissions continue unabated.
But GMST probably isn't rising as fast as it would if not for certain meliorative technological and political trends already evident. Just how tragic global warming ends up being, will be largely determined by future collective choices to take the profit out of selling fossil fuels, along with a big dose of luck. I remain hopeful despite recent electoral setbacks. What, me worry? It's only my problem for a couple of decades longer!
Mal, Hits very close to home. It is no wonder you and I agree on so many things. I have decided to try and take my efforts to inform and persuade to the next level by launching my own platform, https://justdean.substack.com . It is part of the reason I started using my real name instead of the pseudonym, Just Dean. Please check it out if you are interested.
Dean, I took a look at your substack, and liked what I saw. I couldn't find anything to argue with! Nor do you take feedback from readers, it appears. I enjoy the interaction with other commenters on the fora you and I both frequent: not just the substantive dialogue, but the gleeful troll whacking too! I find I don't need my own substack to do that, however. As much pushback as I get here, I strongly doubt anyone will click away for my random unprompted utterances. And I apologize for not following you. I've got too much virtual clutter in my life already, I'm afraid. I'm happy to trade likes with you, however 8^)!
I wonder if part of this disconnect is also shaped by worldview. Many people are raised with narratives in which ultimate responsibility for the world doesn’t rest with humans alone. If large-scale outcomes are seen as governed by forces beyond us, it’s easy to feel optimistic about one’s own life while remaining pessimistic about collective action.
I've often said I was born at just the right time. I've also had reason to look back on the past decade and think it was an especially good one, for me. I always feel I have to acknowledge that not everyone had a good pandemic and many people have lived through war and other tragedies. That's how I also explain the numbers below. Even people that had a good year are sympathetic to those that didn't.
"For example, 85% of the French said it was a bad year for France, but only 45% said it was bad for them."
Not gonna lie: this comes across as rather condescending. You assume I don't know these things?
My original comment was on Antoine's astute observation that what people say in studies differs from what they actually do. But it seems you have a book about the Tragedy of the Commons to sell.
I apologize. Nothing personal, you merely presented a target of opportunity 8^}. I agree that if enough people internalized their social costs, those costs wouldn't have be paid for by everyone else. I don't have any books to sell.
As you're aware, however, you're not my only audience. I'm looking at common-pool resource tragedies like anthropogenic global warming from an economic and therefore political perspective. What I'm trying to 'sell', if you will, is democratic collective intervention to decarbonize the US economy, which needs only about 1.5% more votes than it got in 2024. If I were literally selling something, I'd be more polite!
Or maybe I'm just here for the argument clinic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkQhK8O9Jik) ;^D?
I must be living in a different world than the rest of you. I’m not remotely optimistic about my life.
I have worked very hard all my life, have done all the things you’re supposed to do and I can’t foresee any possibility I’m going to be OK.
Ah. That class. My sympathies. I'm in the same class. I guess I've just been lucky.
Exactly! You’ve been lucky!
I see these numbers as making sense for two reasons. For the collective pessimism, I pin this on the 24/7 news cycle that focuses on the bad news for the simple reason that it brings in the audience. Crime, natural disasters, etc. always happened, but we didn't have 24-hour cable news and computers 50 years ago to continually push the bad stuff. As for the personal optimism, for most of us, societal problems aren't problems at all until they hit home. It's like the old saying that the economy is in a recession when your neighbor loses his job, but it's a depression when you lose yours.
Better play "It's the End of The World as We Know It (and I'm feeling fine)"
A couple of points to add to the mix:
- it's been shown somewhere that social media gives people an exaggerated sense of crime and disaster ongoing in their neighbourhood, as social media algorithms know what people's subconscious minds tend to focus on. This results in parents restricting their children's movements and unsupervised play. Referenced by Jonathan Haidt recently if you're looking for the source.
- another point without a reference but it was probably Daniel Kahneman - people's subconscious minds have a good grasp of the extent of the commons available to them. As primitive societies, whole tribes could migrate somewhere new and unsettled. We could rely on gathering resources from the wilderness. As we become more and more aware of how humans have changed the planet, we register subconsciously how much more limited our natural fall-back options and escape routes become. This accounts for the societal pessimism since the time of Socrates, as the ancient Greeks ravaged their environment.
This is really interesting.
I do wonder exactly what populations these surveys are trying to sample. In political polling, the goal is to get a representative sample of registered voters or likely voters. Is the goal here to get a representative sample of all adults? If so, how do they reach people near the bottom of the economic ladder who might be homeless, or disabled, or illiterate, or in prison?
They left out my demographic entirely. It appears they only surveyed the upper class.
“The greatest threat to the world economy is now a politics shaped by pessimism itself,” writes The Economist in its January 2026 editorial, “Pessimism is the world’s main economic problem.”
The warning echoes the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025, which listed declining societal optimism as one of the five greatest threats facing the world.
https://open.substack.com/pub/victorperton/p/pessimism-is-loud-but-it-is-not-destiny?r=f4d9m&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Oh dear ! Desperation indeed ! Fancy quoting ANYTHING from The "World Economic Forum" Victor ! They are the promoters of pessimism personified !
They MUST RANK as NUMBER ONE on the list of Global Risks Report 2025, which listed declining societal optimism as one of the five greatest threats facing the world !
A fanatical conglomeration of "wanna-be-rulers" and neo-Marxists , emulsified by their wealth and ambition , co-operating now BUT each hoping to out-smart the other in the final analysis
and seize the reins-of-power once they have wrecked the current 'world order' , destroyed the democracies , Capitalism and it's financial structures and it's institutions and demoralised the people sufficiently that they are AGAIN willing to "try communism" as a last-resort.........while they fly around in their personal , private jets living high-on-the-hog and amusing themselves playing 'one power group' off against another ', so that they 'self-destruct' and the WEF are left supreme and unchallenged in charge of the chaos they originally 'kick-started' and created !
The Davos Deviants ! What a wonderful coagulation of megalomaniacs , sociopaths and psychopaths ! No thanks Victor ......they are all yours ! Open your eyes man !!!
Trevor, maybe take your time next time before you deride people.
Read my essay "Davos and WEF's Avalanche of Pessimism" https://www.centreforoptimism.com/blog/davos
Whatever you think about them, their risk report last year nailed the same thing as this article nails - the dangers of pessimism. https://www.centreforoptimism.com/blog/decliningoptimism
Victor....I apologise to you if you thought I was deriding you ! I was deriding your source of information ! The WEF is exactly what I described them as , but you can also add HYPOCRISY to their lack of virtues ! The CHAOS and THE PESSIMISM are largely a result of their activities , so , I suppose that they are the experts in that field........and like Konstantin Kisin says of the Muslims who say they HATE ISLAMIC EXTREMISM "We should take them at their word" and insist that they ACT ACCORDINGLY !
Again.....apologies to you and Hannah for my reaction ! Regards , Trevor.
No need to apologise... I read very widely in my research on optimism - last month I got attacked from the other side for quoting the new American Security Strategy on the need for optimism.
Thank you Hannah for making the world a better place. Definitely feeling more optimistic now 😊
Great piece Hannah, especially in the very unmerry month of January.
I'd be really interested to know not just the average ratings of people's report sense of well-being, but also the distribution, and whether that is changing over time. It might be that the average holds up, whilst becoming more polarised. It wouldn't be irrational for people to feel that the world is getting worse if the proportion of people reporting very low well-being is increasing, even if that is compensated for numerically by increased happiness amongst other people.
Todd Rose’s book Collective Illusions (and his work on private opinion surveys more broadly) offers some additional perspective here. Beyond the factors described in this article, Rose argues that our general sentiments about the state of the world are shaped by what we think OTHER people think more than anything else. More troublingly, those same sentiments tend to shape our actions, or lack thereof.
What about response bias? People in poverty and other bad situations tend to be hard to reach with surveys. That could partly explain why individuals who did the survey are happier than they believe the average to be.
I wish they’d surveyed people like me. I’m definitely not ok or optimistic. I do know many people in Europe and they ARE ok. Half of Americans are completely screwed. Did they talk to anyone like me at all, or only the upper class?
Well, what class are you? AFAICT, that makes a difference.
I think I was quite clear.
And half of Americans are struggling, so I doubt the conclusions.
It does appear they only surveyed well-off people.
Seems like the massive gap on immigration ties into how it's been the main drum the right-wing press has been beating lately. "It doesn't matter to me, but where there's so much smoke there's got to be fire, so I guess it matters a lot to the country".