Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy? If you were born between 1960 and 1980, the chances are about 30% that you said, "very happy." If you were born in the 1990s, it's more like 20%.
Since the 1970s, the General Social Survey has posed this question to a representative sample of adults in the US, and it provides a remarkable view of how the responses have changed. Fig. 1 shows the percentage of respondents who said "very happy" as a function of the year they were born. People born in the 1990s and 2000s, sometimes called Generation Z, are substantially less happy than previous generations.
One explanation for this trend is offered by the main character of a recent satirical novel, "I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom." He says, "There's a war in Europe, you know. And a plague. And constant mass shootings. And democracy is collapsing. And climate change is about to render the species extinct."
These might seem like legitimate reasons to be unhappy, but they don't explain why young people now are more unhappy than people who lived through the Spanish Flu pandemic, two world wars, the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, gang violence in the 1990s, and the pervasive threat of nuclear annihilation.
Stop Doomscrolling
It seems likely that at least part of the explanation is excessive consumption of relentlessly negative news media, as documented by Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, among others. Negativity bias in the media is not new, and may be a basic element of human psychology, but new engagement patterns in social media have created feedback cycles that amplify the effect, especially for people who grew up immersed in them.
On long-term trends, most things in the world are getting better, but gradual improvements don't make the news. Most people are unaware of these trends, as demonstrated by Hans Rosling and the Gapminder project, which hosts quizzes you can use to test your knowledge of global development. As one of many examples, "How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters (Fig. 2) change over the last hundred years?" Do you think it has more than doubled, stayed about the same, or decreased to less than half?
With the hint that most things are getting better, you might have guessed correctly that it has decreased to less than half, maybe less than a tenth, depending on which decades you compare—at the same time that world population has doubled. But more than 80% of the people who take the quiz get it wrong, which is worse than if they had guessed. Nearly every question shows the same pattern: things are getting better, and people don't know it.
Even Climate Change?
But even if you accept that things are getting better, that wouldn't count for much if "climate change is about to render the species extinct." Fortunately, it isn't. In my opinion, we have not reacted as quickly as we should have, and we are still not doing enough. But we are not doomed—there are still paths forward that avoid the worst effects of climate change while maintaining other positive trends. I think Hannah Ritchie makes this case well in her recent book, "Not the End of the World."
Ritchie is a researcher at Our World in Data, an organization with the mission to publish "research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems." Their work is based on the belief that we can use data to understand the world better, and use that understanding to make the world better.
As an example, one of the barriers to addressing climate change has been the tradeoff between economic development and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, this tradeoff is becoming less acute—many rich countries have already achieved decoupling, maintaining economic growth while cutting per capita emissions. These data suggest that we can alleviate suffering due to poverty while effectively managing the costs of climate change.
More concretely, data can help us allocate resources in ways that have the highest potential for impact. As an example, Project Drawdown ranks methane leak management at #12 on their list of solutions with the greatest potential for reducing the effect of greenhouse gases, and #4 on the list of solutions related to energy (after wind power, utility-scale solar, and distributed solar). They estimate that "a large portion of this emissions savings can be had at low or no net cost when factoring in savings from reduced natural gas losses." If you are looking for ways to make positive change in the world, you could do worse than finding and fixing methane leaks.
And if you are unhappy because you are overwhelmed by bad news, consider curating your media diet. Disconnect from sources that amplify fear and outrage. Use data to see long-term trends, understand the causes of incremental improvement, and make decisions that bring us closer to a stable, habitable planet, and a good quality of life for everyone on it.
