No More Downer Endings
In which someone who constantly thinks the world is ending tries to orient towards hope a little bit.
This got longer than I expected, but I think going forward it’ll be slightly less essay-y. I’m winging it though, so feel free to let me know your thoughts and opinions. Also, I know there are a lot of links, they’re partially acting as my citations, but I’ll try to include what I think is most worth engaging with at the bottom and/or as embedded content.
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Everything is kind of a downer these days. Yes, this is an understatement. Personally, I already tend towards thinking about all the bad things that are happening, and this year has certainly kept me oversupplied on content. I’ve always wondered how people who are really constantly fighting the good fight don’t burn out or crumble under the weight of it. AOC comes to mind, although she did recently admit she’s not always sure about staying in politics and sometimes wants to start a homestead somewhere, which is fair.
We have 7 years to do something about climate change
Recently, the concept of framing Big World Issues in the positive has been stewing in my mind a bit. The Substack newsletter Giving to Strangers (would recommend! It’s written by Anya Marchenko, who was 2 years above me in high school and who I thought was so cool and continues to seem pretty cool) raised the point briefly in discussing climate change.
Wayne [Hsiung, Berkeley mayoral candidate] takes the prospect of triggering loss aversion seriously. He avoids taxes or other punitive measures for consumers (but not corporations, more on that below), and instead focuses on what people can gain through animal welfare or climate progress.
The behavioral science challenge at the core of addressing climate change is one of intertemporal choice and present bias. The costs of climate change are not immediately visible or tangible, so it seems like a proposition where activists are asking governments to throw down a whole lot of money and asking individual people to give up a lot of their current lifestyle for some sort of foggy, distant threat. While the window for pivotal and meaningful action is closing, the real end-of-the-world vibes won’t be here for a bit. Although that feels less true when you think about the hurricanes and fires we’ve seen this year alone.
We also know that humans hate uncertainty and are loss averse—losses loom larger than equivalent gains, and we want to avoid them. Yet the climate movement has often framed its issues in an apocalyptic way. Not fun to think about. Nobody likes being shamed for contributing to the end of humanity, and shame prevents us from talking things out and from acting.
Another framing here is to highlight all the positives that would arise from real climate action, which is something that the Green New Deal does very well. It imagines a brighter future, not just a future that looks like our present minus the looming threat of extinction. In a world where I can list for you a million other crises, many of which are way more directly salient and relevant to most peoples’ lives, it is hard to always have climate change at the forefront of your mind. It is profoundly mentally and emotionally taxing in an already deeply mentally and emotionally taxing existence.
The scare tactics of right-wing opposition to many sweeping social reform proposals involve some variant of “they’re coming for your way of life,” AKA all-encompassing threat of loss. Our way of life isn’t doing too great for many people! There’s a better one out there, but it’s hard to imagine because we’re biased towards the default, the status quo. A world without plastic, cars, meat, oil and gas, etc.? Sounds like you’re just taking away lots of things that benefit me right now. A world with more dignified work, cleaner air, cleaner water, healthier food, and more equality? Sign me up. There will be growing pains, but there is also growth. It’s not just about avoiding calamity, there’s actual benefits.
I want to never fight an insurance company again. Also people deserve healthcare.
For our broken healthcare system, I think this thought also matters. When the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) was created in 1948, it was not unanimously lauded. In 2018, the NHS was the British institution that its citizens were second-most proud of (behind the fire brigade, lol) according to YouGov, and the NHS often tops polls asking “What makes you most proud to be British?” I want to say this is because people didn’t realize how great the NHS was going to be until they had it. Right now, I cannot imagine the US healthcare system being one of the things that makes me proud to be an American. I also have a lot of trouble really internalizing what publicly-funded healthcare would be like, experience-wise, as a patient. It’s like the flip side of when you watch British people try to understand the concept of health insurance deductibles or fathom that giving birth costs $10,000+ in the US and they look as concerned and confused as the math woman meme.
Imagining “not being stressed about if my insurance will cover my healthcare / if I have health insurance” is hard to do well because it’s imagining the absence of a thing. In terms of showing the people what they’re missing out on, the closest examples in the US would be Medicare and Veteran Affairs, both of which have pretty high approval. Medicare For All is pretty well-supported, and should be considering, you know, recent events. To refer to another Substack I have recently subscribed to, Matthew Yglesias (co-founder of Vox) wrote in his, Slow Boring, about the idea of making Democratic ideas appealing again by showing people just how great they’d be in practice by enacting them in a state like Massachusetts, which pioneered the Affordable Care Act, which aligns pretty well with what I’ve been ranting about here.
I promise I’m going to talk about *anything other than COVID* someday
Another downer on everyone’s minds may or may not be the COVID-19 pandemic! “Stay home so you don’t indirectly contribute to someone’s hospitalization or death” is pretty compelling to many people, but not everyone, and it wears down over time. Like climate change, the costs of COVID-19 are not borne equally, and are not immediately visible and tangible to everyone. There are other issues that feel understandably more urgent like job losses, housing and food insecurity, etc. The economy has been juxtaposed against public health for much of this pandemic, to the detriment of both the economy and public health. The virtue/solidarity-signalling of “stay home to save lives” or “I wear a mask to protect strangers” is promising in some ways, but I really think the whole “we’re all in this together” thing is not comforting anymore. The shaming and squabbling and finger-pointing reminds me of the individual responsibility narrative of climate change that distracts from the big moves we need our governments to be making.
Like healthcare systems though, positivity here would involve imagining the absence of a thing rather than an active new thing. The end of COVID-19 that we’re generally hoping for is a “return to normal.” While there are fifty million (my official tally) think pieces on how COVID-19 will reshape [insert your favorite or least favorite institution, organization, or social convention here], we also just want to be jostled by sweaty strangers at a concert, people-watch and pretend we’re being productive at a coffee shop, and eat safely at a restaurant indoors. In my personal (and obviously biased and limited) consumption of ~COVID messaging~ I haven’t seen that much active equating of regaining those privileges and being safe right now though, but please let me know if you have seen something along those lines. Coming out of lockdown in the UK, we’re now back on a tiered system and in London restaurants and bars are open (if the bars serve food). News-wise, I’ve seen a lot more about how reopening works than anything about if lockdown 2 worked, how many potential lives were saved, etc. Maybe that’s because not all the data is in yet, I’m not sure. It’s also not super gripping to hear “X thousands of people were NOT hospitalized,” because it seems pretty abstract.
I wonder now if there is an effective positive framing for COVID-19 protective behaviors. There is some interesting behavioral science discussion out there, especially from UPenn, about how we promote vaccination with social norms and incentives and help people match their intentions with their actions. But we need to make it to full vaccine rollout without absolutely destroying our healthcare system and healthcare workers in the meantime. Lockdowns have been both portrayed and construed as punitive in some cases; in the weeks leading up the Lockdown 2 for the UK, I would see news articles with Boris telling us that if people aren’t safe now, we’ll have to be put in lockdown, which honestly evokes the same energy as parents threatening to put a child in time-out if they don’t finish their chores. Except you’re not just the one child, your fate is tied to a bunch of other children who you cannot coordinate with.
We’re being presented with an immediate loss (of being able to go places, celebrate holidays) in order to have the hope of reducing a less fathomable but staggering loss (of people facing long-term health consequences and/or dying). How do we frame the upcoming months positively? The German government’s recent ads targeting young people make a sort of attempt at this, with an old man recalling the winter of 2020 spent on the couch in the way a war veteran would recount their time on the frontlines. It highlights the prospect of a warm glow afterwards, a point where people can be proud that they stayed home and did their part.
Another example in this vein might be how Canadian cities are embracing creative outdoor placemaking as you can see in this Twitter thread. If you’ve got better answers, please send them to me and CC the governments of the world. Everyone’s been talking a lot about the post-COVID world and all the changes that’ll involve, the better world we could potentially build, but maybe we need to speed it up and start now. It’d be nice to be excited about the future to an extent greater than “not living in a pandemic.”
Dystopian narratives and political chaos dramas have gone out of fashion in the last few years, in my opinion because real life got too similar. In television, we have shows like The Good Place exemplifying the utopia kind of narrative we’re craving now. I’m starting to think we need that utopian frame of mind more often when examining all the things that make me feel like the world is ending.
**The day after I wrote this, I got this ad on Twitter which features David Beckham in old person makeup announcing the eradication of malaria at some unspecified future time point, which I thought was an interesting attempt at positive framing that didn’t resonate with me as much as the Green New Deal video, potentially because I am lucky enough to have no real emotional associations with malaria (but I do think about how scientists figured out how we could kill all the mosquitoes at least once a month).
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Thanks for making it to the end! If you thought this was interesting, I’d be honored if you subscribed for more of me applying behavioral science to my crises about the world / thinking about other third things and/or shared this post with friends. :)
Here are a few pieces that I really appreciated and I’ve been thinking about recently in relation to what was discussed:
A Message From the Future is a 7-minute video narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that I mentioned earlier on. She explains from an imagined future how the Green New Deal panned out for us all.
I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle. by Mary Annaise Heglar, makes it perfectly clear that the individual responsibility / personal consumerism narrative we’ve been fed on climate change is not the end-all. I especially liked this quote: “At the same time, though, the more we focus on individual action and neglect systemic change, the more we’re just sweeping leaves on a windy day. So while personal actions can be meaningful starting points, they can also be dangerous stopping points.”
Imagining the Green City, from Giving to Strangers by Anya Marchenko, interviewing recent Berkeley mayoral candidate Wayne Hsiung about his approach to climate advocacy.
A Year of Talking About Climate Change by Emily Raboteau, in which the author shows us her record of trying to converse about climate change all the time. It gets at this tension I feel about being able to forget about big issues because they don’t affect me even though I feel like I should also be somehow working on / discussing them all the time.