Spreading Hope In A World Full of Doombait
Why you should embrace prosocial behaviors to boost happiness for yourself and others.
My media consumption put me in a funk recently. Every recommended link on my YouTube was negative, talking about death, destruction, and various wars and conflicts and crimes being committed. Without realizing it, I started ruminating on bad memories, old bygones, and turned into moody mess. It hasn’t helped that an election year is in full swing, making the future feel quite scary.
The problem remains that news organizations and content creators are responding to incentives. A study by famed academic publication, Nature, confirmed the readily apparent insight: negative headlines drive more engagement than positive ones. In short, fear pays. And we pay the price with our mental health.
In the backdrop of so much negativity, much of which is exaggerated to game your attention, it’s worth pausing to reflect on the beauty and joy that flitters about unseen. It’s worth remembering how incredible humans actually are. There’s an exercise each of you can do to help others — and yourself.
First, remember this about humans
Smallpox first arrived more than 10,000 years ago. In the 20th century alone, it killed 300–500 million people. Nearly 30% of those afflicted died. Survivors were often maimed and left with a poor quality of life. At one point, more than 30% of all blind people lost their vision from this disease.
Between 1850 and 1910, mandatory vaccines pushed the disease out of North America and Europe. Then, the World Health Organization led the charge to eradicate smallpox and, in 1977, the last natural case was seen. This was a horrible disease that killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone. Smart, healthy people came together and risked their lives to help strangers — solely because they cared.
People once feared that HIV/AIDS was world-ending and their concerns were well founded. There was no cure and the disease was sweeping across the world. Today, we can treat HIV so well that it’s non-detectable on a test and the drugs are only improving. This should give you hope that mankind can collaborate and solve our biggest problems.
If only the news spoke more about how our ozone layer is repairing itself and how cancer survival rates are at an all-time high and trending better. Perhaps people would be a tiny bit happier. This is where you come in. My hope is that I can use my platform to help spread more positivity into the world — but I can’t do it without you.
A study that leads to a task
Psychology professor, Dr. Joseph Chancellor, ran an experiment where he asked a handful of people to go out into the world and do something nice for strangers. They isolated “givers”, “control” and “receivers”.
Each week, the givers performed five acts of kindness for a personalized list of people across four weeks. At the end of the experiment, both the Givers and Receivers reported a host of benefits. The receivers also paid it forward, giving acts of kindness 278% more than the control group.
The givers were less depressed, stressed, and more satisfied with their job. They were less negative. Their acts not only rippled into the lives of strangers but also into unrelated aspects of their own lives.
The big idea is that you should embrace prosocial behaviors (charity, kindness, cooperation). And in an appeal to your ego, one study showed that highly intelligent people are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior than others. They showed higher levels of empathy and moral identity, and thus took action. Perhaps they understood that it is mutually beneficial to improve the lives of people around them. After all, how can we have a positive future if we only look out for ourselves?
Primates are highly social, operating in groups where sharing and cooperation ensure the whole’s survival. For millions of years, we groomed each other, picking bugs off of each other’s backs. We slept with our backs against each other to feel closer and safer.
We are not the descendants of killer barn cats. We are hairless, affectionate monkeys who like to give and receive love. It’s as the Beatles once wrote, “The love you take is equal to the love you make.”
By proactively carrying out acts of kindness, you become a force of good in a flawed and complicated world. You lay down proof of which side of morality you stand on. There is no arguing with your actions. You become the good you hope to see.
What specifically could you do?
There’s an easy and zero-cost way of making a difference: tell someone they did a good job. Be specific about why. Say you appreciate them being diligent with their work and caring enough to get it right — or come up with something else to say. Above all, be genuine. People are proven to underestimate how impactful a compliment can be.
Many workers live in thankless, low-paid anonymity. They deal with rude, entitled customers who treat them like indentured servants. A kind gesture can go far and ripple further.
Or — just help someone. I’ll give you an example. My girlfriend once called me and said she was broken down on the side of the road near my house. I drove over and saw her standing on the side of the road with her car, looking completely helpless. I was sure I’d be able to help her — but got a rude awakening as I arrived.
I got behind her car to start pushing. She sat and steered. Rush hour was in full blast. Cars were zooming by, some honking, like we had a choice in being on the road. I was breathing hard and the car was barely moving and I had more than a football field’s distance to go. I looked like a low-rent, less-jacked version of Sisyphus, trying to push a boulder up a mountain.
Then, suddenly the car lurched forward. Two men appeared beside me, pushing. I heard them grunting as they pushed. The car accelerated more and more until we were almost at a light jog. They were complete strangers. They saw me struggling and pulled over to come help.
I thanked them profusely afterwards, and they waved it off as no problem and walked back to their car on the other side of the road. The incident still makes me smile when I think about it. You could do this for a complete stranger.
Instead of clicking or indulging your 10th fear-inducing video, consider instead doing something nice for a stranger with no expectation of anything in return. Compliment someone for doing good work and be genuine. Pro-social behaviors are proven to boost happiness and contentment. There is so much good and kindness waiting to be spread into the world.
And above all, stay hopeful. As a species, we’ve faced many big threats in the past and have always found a way to triumph.
I'm a former financial analyst turned writer out of sunny Tampa, Florida. I began writing eight years ago on the side and fell in love with the craft. My goal is to provide non-fiction story-driven content to help us live better and maximize our potential. My content has many anecdotes and stories from my own life. This is intentional. I do this to show how these topics have impacted my daily living, and to share some vulnerability and mistakes I've made, and also to avoid being too preachy. I have skin in the game as much as you do in learning about these topics. I try to anchor my content in credible sourcing. Online writing has become too much of a free-for-all that lacks credibility, so I lean on the halls of academia, and on science that stands up to scrutiny. My goal is to have an ongoing relationship with my readers, to respect your time, and make my content worth revisiting. I'd also like to see a world where people are kinder and more empathetic towards each other. Writing is my small effort to help in that fight. Outside of writing, I live a fairly regular life, spending time with my spouse Laura, exercising, listening to podcasts, eating good food.