A lot of it is because of our negative thinking instincts. It's always easier for us to notice bad things than good things. This instinct for negative thinking manifests itself in three ways: first, our memories of past mistakes; second, selective reporting of negative news by the media and social activists; Third, we always feel that whenever something bad happens, we shouldn't think that the world is getting better.

"Warning: What you remember is always worse than it actually is"

For centuries, we've heard old people talk about how well they lived when they were young; They will emphasize that things are not as rosy as they were then. This is often not the case, and many things used to be worse, not better. But it's often easy to forget what things were like before.

In Western Europe and North America, only those who are very old have experienced the Second World War and the Great Depression, and only they have some first-hand experience of the hunger and poverty that occurred only a few centuries ago. But even in countries like China and India, where the vast majority of the population lived in extreme poverty just a few generations ago, people today ride electric cars, live in decent houses, and wear clean clothes and don't remember the poverty of generations ago.

In 1970, a well-known Swedish writer and journalist, Rathsberg, wrote a very famous report on rural life in India. Twenty-five years later, when he returned to the village where he had written his report, it was clear to him that living conditions had improved dramatically. The photographs he took in 1970 also include houses with slabs of land, mud walls, and children. There is no self-esteem in the eyes of the villagers in the photo, and these villagers know almost nothing about the outside world. There is a stark contrast between them in the photo and who they are today. Today in neat concrete houses, children are dressed neatly, and villagers full of self-confidence and curiosity are watching TV. When Rathberg showed the villagers the photographs he had taken in 1970, they did not believe that they had been taken next to them. They said no, it wasn't filmed here, you must be mistaken, we've never been that poor. Like most people, they live in the moment and only care about their immediate problems, such as their children watching too many boring soap operas, or not having enough money to buy a motorcycle.

In addition to our own life memories, sometimes we deliberately avoid the savagery and misfortune of the past. These barbaric and unfortunate pasts can be found in ancient cemeteries. Those cemeteries contained many children's bones. Some died of starvation or terrible diseases, but there were also many children whose bones showed signs of injury, indicating that they had been brutally killed. In today's cemeteries, it is rare to find children's graves.

Selective reporting

We are inundated with endless negative news almost every day: wars, famines, natural disasters, political mistakes, corruption, budget cuts, disease, mass unemployment, terrorist acts. If a reporter were to report on a normally landed plane or a normally harvested crop, he would soon be out of work. Incremental progress has had a huge impact on millions of people, but they have struggled to make headlines as news.

Thanks to media freedom and more advanced science and technology, we can now hear more about disasters than ever before. Centuries ago, when Europeans slaughtered Indians in the Americas, it couldn't make worldwide news. In the past, when ecosystems were destroyed, or when a species was on the verge of extinction, no one would notice it at all, and no one would care. As we have made tremendous progress in other areas, we have improved in monitoring human suffering, and these increased reports are in themselves a sign of human progress. But they leave the opposite impression on people.

At the same time, social activists and lobbyists are very skillful in portraying every point in the process of human development as the end of the world, intimidating people by inflating predictions while ignoring the overall trend of progress. In the United States, for example, the overall rate of violent crime is decreasing, however, every time a crime occurs, there are many reports, which gives most people the impression that violent crime is increasing.

We often don't remember the past properly, we don't remember a year ago, 10 years ago, or 50 years ago, and the reality was worse than it is now, and as a result, we have the illusion that the world is getting worse and worse. And this delusion has brought great anxiety to many people, and it has also made many people lose hope.

Emotional rather than rational

There are other reasons for this, like, are people really thinking rationally when they express that the world is getting worse? My guess is that they didn't, they just made such an answer emotionally. If, after I've shown you so many facts and figures, you still don't believe that the world is getting better, I guess it must be because you know there are still huge problems that remain unsolved. My guess is that when you think I'm telling you that the world is getting better, you're telling you that everything is good and that you shouldn't focus on those problems, or pretend they don't exist. This makes you feel ridiculous and anxious.

I agree, not everything is getting better, and we are still worried about a lot. As long as there are still planes crashing, children still dying unexpectedly, endangered species still there, climate warming still occurring, machismo still there, crazed dictators still there, toxic waste products still being put in jail, or still girls not being able to go to school simply because of their gender, we can't let up as long as these horrible things still exist.

But it is still absurd and worrying if we ignore the tremendous progress we have made. People often call me an optimist because I always let them see huge improvements that they never knew existed. But that makes me angry, and I don't want to be called an optimist because that makes me seem naïve. I'm a possibist, and I coined the word myself. This means not having unprovoked hopes, nor fearing unprovoked, and more sustainably confronting an overly emotional worldview. As a possibilityist, I see progress in reality, and these give me hope for greater progress in the future. It's not optimism, it's just a clear and reasonable understanding of the truth of the facts. This requires the development of a constructive, practical worldview.

When people mistakenly believe that we have not made much progress, they will come to the wrong conclusions, that nothing we are doing now will work, and that will lead to a loss of confidence in what actually works. I've met too many of these people who have told me that they have utterly lost hope in humanity; Or they go to the other extreme, become radicals, support some extreme measures to destroy productivity,