Worry Machines

A READER WRITES: “I am amazed that you have not taken the opportunity to heal the masses or at least alleviate their post-budget trauma by a few well-chosen philosophical adages. Are you neglecting your mission?”

BB SAYS: So the masses are suffering from post-budget trauma. Why? What are they worrying about? There is nothing to worry about. Human beings are designed to worry – we are created in order to be fearful and anxious. We have evolved to notice bad news and to ignore good news. Often the bad news is not even bad news at all.

Psychologists call this human trait Negativity Bias – this is the psychological phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative than positive experiences and information. Negativity bias is the biggest source of human misery in the world. Some people literally worry themselves to death, mostly over nothing. Most of the fear and anxiety we experience is completely unnecessary.

Why do humans suffer from negativity bias? Because we have evolved that way – during the most of our evolutionary development, the potential cost of not noticing something bad, far exceeded the potential cost of not noticing something good. The people who spent all their time worrying were less likely to be eaten by tigers.

The environment in which we humans evolved was much more dangerous than the environment we now live in. Thanks to efforts of our stressed-out ancestors, we actually live in the safest period ever in human history. There is higher life-expectancy, much less violence, much less hunger, much less disease and much less suffering than there ever has been before. But you wouldn’t know this by reading the newspapers would you? There is actually much less need to worry about anything than ever before in history. But are people worrying less? Like hell they are. They still have the same brains that they had during the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution when there was a predator around every corner, and when life-expectancy was about 30. But our ability to assess risk is hopeless.

Here is a small list of things that people spend their time worrying about, even though there is no need to worry about any of them: the recession, terrorism, religion, unemployment, crime, illness, careers, nuclear warfare, the environment. Expand the list for yourself. Doing so will brighten up your week.

There is too much worrying in the world, and there will continue to be too much worrying. A deficit of worrying is not our problem. So the wise thing to do is this: stand back and let other people do the worrying.