Data As Therapy
Photo from Unsplash
If you read through all the articles I’ve written here so far, you will likely notice that a few people influence me greatly. One of those men is Hans Rosling, author of Factfulness. Another is Michael Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never. This is a post observing the marriage of the two.
I actually started writing book reviews after I read Apocalypse Never, so I have spent some time this week re-reading it in hopes of providing a high-quality review with the information fresh on my mind. As I tend to do when reading something for the second time I find new, possibly more nuanced nuggets of wisdom. Maybe this is why Naval advises that one should only ever read the same 100 books over and over again. This week I found two nuggets from Shellenberger while coincidentally publishing my #WednesdayWisdom for those who follow me on social media. The two dovetailed well; maybe it wasn’t coincidence at all.
“An exaggerated fear of death reveals a deep and often subconscious dissatisfaction with one’s life. What we really fear when we obsess over our death is that we aren’t making the most of our lives. We feel stuck in bad relationships, unsupportive communities, or oppressive careers.
That was certainly the case for me [Shellenberger]. I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago. I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate change reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment.
Perhaps it is a coincidence, but it is notable that the spike in environmental alarmism comes at a time when anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising within the general population, especially among adolescents, in both the United States and Europe. Seventy percent of American teenagers call anxiety and depression a major problem. ”
Wow, I thought to myself. Is our natural predisposition to subconsciously seek out negativity? To point fingers at others because of dissatisfaction in our own lives? My mind was turned on, oriented towards these questions. Shellenberger bravely goes on to admit this struggle in his own life.
“Twenty years ago, I discovered that the more apocalyptic environmentalist books and articles I read, the sadder and more anxious I felt.
This was in sharp contrast to how I felt after reading histories of the civil rights movement, whose leaders were committed to an ethos, and politics, of love, not anger.
It was, in part, my awareness of the impact that reading about climate and the environment had on my mood that led me to doubt whether environmentalism could be successful. It was only several years later that I started to question environmentalism’s claims about energy, technology, and the natural environment. Now that I have, I can see that much of my sadness over environmental problems was a projection, and misplaced.
There is more reason for optimism than pessimism.”
Wow, I thought again to myself. How self-aware do you have to become to be able to not only admit this to yourself but to admit this to the world? Again, my mind was oriented towards self-examination; then Rosling’s writing came into full view.
Factfulness is a book that shows how outdated our information manuals have become (book review to come). Much of our knowledge of the world was engrained during our school years and most of us haven’t updated that knowledge in the years post-college - decades for many. While both authors echo each other’s sentiment that alarmism hurts us all, I found that they also echo each other on this epistemological problem.
As Rosling educated me, a chimpanzee (yes, the monkey) scores better than humans on his Gapminder Test. In his observation, only actively wrong “knowledge” can make us [humans] score so badly. If aliens sent a team to earth to observe the humans race, they would have to be disappointed. Imagine them watching a human walking a dog. Then imagine the alien research team notates the human as it picks up the dog’s excrement. Would they think the dog was in charge and the human’s superior?
So, I posed the following question to those who follow Hefner.Energy on LinkedIn last week.
The distribution of results are no different than the rest of the millions who have taken Rosling’s test. Most people believe the world is getting worse and this is due to actively wrong “knowledge.” Interestingly, my Twitter followers appear to be more informed than my LinkedIn followers; this is something I’m going to actively watch as I continue my #WednesdayWidsom series, let’s get some healthy competition going here!
Get ready for some Data as Therapy! Not only is the world getting better, it’s thriving!
It dawned on me that Shellenberger was right; there is more reason for optimism than pessimism - the world is not just better, it’s thriving! That’s data as therapy!
As I wrote in The Social Dilemma and The Office: the platitudes of Michael Scott bouncing around the echo chamber of social media, we tend to mindlessly allow the media to influence the information we ingest and how we think - all for advertising clicks. As Shellenberger and Rosling point out, we need to eradicate ignorance; we need to upgrade people’s knowledge.
To do this, we have to be purposeful. Will you fill your mind with those promoting despair, torturing numbers to create false realities, or those promoting hope? If you passively ingest information, fear and despair will overcome you. So, you’ll have to expend energy and time seeking out reality if you are to become better, possibly something more than you are today. The choice is yours.