You may be living in a Golden Age

By Noel Daly

There is a temptation to think that the world is falling apart. That we are on the brink. A tipping point. By any reasonable measure, this is an absurd thing to believe.

Before I go on, this is not to say that everything is brilliant. There has never been a time when things were perfect, or even close to perfect. And I’m not talking about people who endure particularly heinous circumstances. I’m talking about people broadly. Generationally.

Every generation faces crises. Often, one crisis is a result of the solution to a previous crisis. Climate change, for example, wouldn’t be an issue without the industrial revolution. But can you even contemplate day-to-day living prior to the industrial revolution? Antibiotics saved millions from infection, but created antibiotic resistance. Digital technology connected the world and democratised information, but created misinformation, attention fragmentation, and new mental health issues. Progress is messy.

This idea that everything is terrible is largely driven by having minute-by-minute updates of everything that happens everywhere in the world. This stream of escalatory information can, understandably, make a person conclude that the Apocalypse is just around the corner. But this is a fault of human perception.

Firstly, all human beings are wired for negativity-bias. This is the tendency to give more weight to negative information than positive information. In terms of survival, this makes a lot of sense. It prevents us from resting on our laurels. But it also causes us to take for granted the abundance of positive things in our lives.

Secondly, we succumb to the availability heuristic which means we judge the likelihood or severity of events based on how easily examples come to mind. Minute-by-minute global news makes disasters highly available in memory, so we overestimate how common or imminent they are. You see a video of a riot in Belfast and you think it’s the Troubles all over again.

There is also disaster salience in the way information is presented on social media and on the news. Media and attention systems highlight extreme, dramatic, worst-case events because we latch onto those more. As such, we become stuck in a negative feedback loop. Even take something like the obsession, in Ireland, with yellow and red warnings. Every person knowing the name of every storm is very telling.

As someone who works in Mental Healthcare, it’s not uncommon for me to hear things like, “How could I bring a child into this world?” Which begs the question: What world would you like to bring them into? 1980s Ireland? The 1940s? The Middle Ages?

In addition to the cognitive biases mentioned, I notice that many people believe that happiness is default. As in, being happy is the par mood they should be in. And that if they’re not happy then something must be wrong. This is not how the brain works. I also believe that many people, especially Irish people, think the job of the government is to make them feel happy. This is definitely not the job of government and if you think it is, I’d recommend lowering your expectations.

The average person lives in a time of extraordinary luxury and opportunity. But acknowledging that can be very difficult for people. The tendency is to revert to whataboutery and hyperfocus on the negatives. But if you step back from the noise and examine your life - in the context of what has come before you - you might find that you’re living in an enviable time in human history.