How to save yourself from cynicism
What Could Go Right? is a free weekly newsletter from?The Progress Network?written by our executive director, Emma Varvaloucas. In addition to this newsletter, which collects substantive progress news from around the world, The Progress Network publishes an?anti-apocalypse conversational podcast also called What Could Go Right?.
Welcome to What Could Go Right?, where we are?welcoming the pumpkin spice overlords?with open arms. And mouths.?
Correction:?Last week’s newsletter identified Narendra Modi as India’s president. He is the prime minister.
How to save yourself from cynicism
“My elder kid is in high school,” one Member of The Progress Network (TPN), Charles Kenny, tweeted yesterday. His kid’s teacher asked the class whether humanity as a whole is good or bad. “They were the only one to raise their hand to say ‘good,’” Kenny wrote. The rest of the class said “bad.”
This opinion about humanity’s overwhelming badness isn’t confined to high school classrooms. We’re not here to convince you one way or the other—maybe when the final history on humanity’s run gets written, the outcome will be “bad” after all. But there is a lot more evidence for the “good” than is commonly?recognized.?
Like? Well, most recently, there have been studies showing that cooperation among strangers in the United States has?increased for the past 60 years; that children who missed out on early child-mother bonding can still develop critical social skills from?relationships with trusted neighbors; and that we underestimate how great it feels to be on both the giving and receiving ends of?random acts of kindness. (My favorite tidbit from the last link: if the impulse to do something kind arises, pull a Nike and just do it!)
In many cases, though, the kind of mindset that raises its hand for “humans are?bad” isn’t formed from our everyday interactions with people but from the barrage of the 24-hour news cycle. It won’t surprise TPN readers that yet another study has come?out that says doomscrolling is?literally bad for your health. The study’s lead author, an associate professor at Texas Tech University, told?The Guardian?that overattention to the news “could bring about a ‘constant state of high alert’” that makes “the world seem like a ‘dark and dangerous place.’”
Research shows that teaching your kids that the world is dark and dangerous?is not helpful to them, TPN Member Arthur Brooks writes in?The Atlantic. And if the Texas Tech study is any indication, it’s not helpful to us adults, either.?
Better, then, not to get caught in the doomscrolling trap. While I support the usual anti-doomscrolling advice to take a break from the news or meditate or go on a walk with friends, from my own experience running TPN for the last two years and more than a decade in the media world, those suggestions are more like Band-Aids than actual fixes for figuring out how to healthily engage with current events. I’ve found that a change in mindset in how we?see?the news is actually more sustainable in the long run.
A family member asked me this week, for example, if I was worried about what’s going on at the?Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, where fighting between Russia and Ukraine has left the site vulnerable to disaster. So says a report from The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which naturally resulted in?a spate of news coverage. What’s easy to miss, though, is that what led to the wall-to-wall coverage is actually?part of the situation’s potential solution. The IAEA is the watchdog of the United Nations (UN). Now, with this new report from the IAEA’s visit to the plant, the UN is getting to work on convincing Russia and Ukraine to establish a demilitarized zone around it. There’s no guarantee of success, of course. But the UN?did succeed on a compromise between the two sides once already, when Russia agreed to allow grain exports to restart in the Black Sea.
If you can train yourself to see not only the problem but also an emerging solution, you’ll notice?that emerging solutions are a lot more common than they seem, and that there are a?lot?of good people out there trying to undo the damage the bad ones cause. Efforts are underway to?transform journalism to showcase solutions?better. But as readers, we too?can start identifying them within coverage of even the most serious events.
After more than two years of teaching myself how to do this, I can’t say that it’s obvious or easy. It’s not. But it’s the strategy that has saved me from cynicism in a very cynical zeitgeist.
Before we go
Another cause of cynicism: not realizing that countries are actually dropping their emissions.?China is, for one. And here are?25 others?compiled by Our World in Data that not only pulled off the emissions drop, but grew their economies at the same time.
New climate pledges, if met, would bring the world to two degrees Celsius of warming. But are those pledges credible??Actually, yeah, says a new study in?Nature, especially the super ambitious ones.
Thinking about buying an electric car? Our man in Thailand Brian Leli?has your questions answered, like where electric vehicle batteries and components come from, whether they really have a lower carbon footprint than combustion cars, and much more. The questions were inspired by a newsletter reader who wrote in to us a few weeks ago.
Last but not least, bad news for wannabe Trumps and good news for the rest of us: the Electoral Reform Act is?picking up steam.
Below in the links section,?elk and bison bounce back in the US, bike racks replace parking spaces in the Netherlands, inhaled Covid vaccines get approval?in China, and more.
—Emma Varvaloucas
Progress Pop Quiz
Thanks to our readers who took our quiz last week! Unfortunately, no respondent got all three questions correct. Here are the right answers:
Question:?Are American youths committing more or less violent crime since 2006?Answer:?Less. An August report from the US Department of Justice shows a 67% decline in the number of youth arrests for violent crimes since 2006. Take a look at the graph?here.
Question:?Has current US approval of labor unions gone up or down since 2010?Answer:?Up. It was 48% in 2010, and according to Gallup is?now a whopping 71%, on par with the approval rate in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
Question:?Are suicide rates worldwide higher or lower than they were in 1990?Answer:?Lower. Suicide rates have?fallen almost 40% worldwide, according to Our World in Data research.
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I was in America’s most hated church. Here’s how to stop extremism: Twitter saved her from Westboro Baptist Church. Now she has a message for how we bridge the divide of modern America. |?Freethink
Why we picked it: In a nutshell, for these two points from Megan Phelps-Roper: (1) "Even people who seem to be horrible are humans who will be better reached by kindness and generosity and compassion," and (2) "But the other part of the equation is, maybe they see something that you don't. Maybe there's something in their perspective that should be changing yours."?—Brian Leli
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