Systematically negative

Systems and habits are powerful. If you are not designing your systems and habits, you are leaving your life to chance.

The odds are that many positive habits will be created during your lifetime. There are parents, teachers, coaches and friends who all help generate the mental models necessary to create those habits.

Many will be positive. Most children wake up, brush their teeth, and go to school. Most will bath during the day to keep clean. While these are simple, common behaviors, society has created the mental models where most of us follow patterns and routines to do these.

This wasn’t always the case. In fact, brushing one’s teeth wasn’t as common as today until WWII. Before then, the habits weren’t there. Now, most of us follow this routine without thought.

So, you are bound to create some positive habits in your life regardless of who you are. Regardless of your family or the government, it is very likely that if you are alive today, you have positive habits such as brushing your teeth and attending school as a child.

While many positive habits come from these positive mental models from society, some negative ones also come to be.

We are bombarded with a negative, biased view of the world. In Factfulness - Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling, he addresses these inaccuracies. He explains that most of think many aspects of life on earth are deteriorating when the opposite is true.

He says, “Factfullness is recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.”

I was among the majority who thought that many aspects were getting worse. But through statistics and trend analysis, Rosling disproved many of those negative mental models I held.

He explains that we have made tremendous progress, not regression. The past was not as rosy as we thought, and the present isn’t as bad as what gets presented.

The key is that we have to start to take control of our perspective. We should get the facts, not go from how we felt after reading the news.

If we do, and if you read his book, you will start to realize we are all systematically being duped. We are being misled to think the world is horrible.

While there are always going to be atrocities, the world is very much improving. Society is getting better. We are pulling people out of poverty. We are getting healthier and living longer.

Many of the negative themes we hear on a regular basis are false. That leaves us vulnerable. We look for the politician promising to bring back the old days. We want the preacher who will tell us that even though everything is terrible, it will get better.

But if we are already improving, why don’t we keep focusing on that? It is because it isn’t attention-grabbing. Nobody cares that we have improved so many aspects of the human existence since 1960. Instead, we want to know about the bus of school children that went off the road last week. Or we focus on those who remain in extreme poverty instead of seeing that the percentage of those in poverty has been cut in half.

If you find yourself forming bad habits, look around and see if there are systematically negative mental models being pushed on you. Realize that many of those are false. Then work to create more positive sources and a more realistic perspective of the world. Because the world is getting better in so many ways, don’t get sucked into believing we are on a downward spiral, because we are NOT.