In The Age of Uncertainty, narrative and pessimism often win over optimism and facts - yet optimism and facts are what we need to live a fulfilling life - and historically the facts are amazingly positive. Musical accompaniment by Garbage, Jim Croce, Lucinda Williams, and Social Distortion.
Are We Only Happy When It Rains?
This ain’t the worst consumer sentiment we’ve ever seen. That’s not saying much. June of 2022 was the worst, followed closely by May of 1980. The high was January of 2000. February of 1998 was way up there, too. So was February of 2020.
One reason sentiment is so poor is the ongoing separation between wages and the price of things you buy every day.
For sure, some items cost less in real dollars. However, these are items you tend to buy years apart - computers, televisions, and cars (yes, there has been a spike in automobile prices over the last three years, but over time the real dollar cost has been less than inflation for every day items, and there is a recent, sizeable drop in the resale prices of used cars). Energy costs tend to spike somewhat dramatically, which creates angst in the highest degree.
The bigger picture? Worldwide, we are far better off now than ever before.
“But that’s not the we way it feels”.
It is nearly certain that, at some point, we will have a recession. Recessions are common.
This narrative, repeated over and over by the financial news media addictive pornography sites, is sticky. It triggers your brain’s safety mechanism, the fight or flight response. Barring the lightning-flash, COVID-triggered recession in 2020, this is the longest period between recessions since 1970. Statistically, we should see a recession soon, although current facts do not support this. Here is a podcast on the subject. Recessions are normal in our economy, and yet every time we experience one it feels like it will never end. Observationally, neither the 1929-32 crash, the 1973-74 great recession, nor the 2008-09 great recessions broke our economy. We have arisen stronger economically every single time.
There are, in addition, always negative stories you can tell, whether it is the climate, war in Ukraine, the court system in Israel, the Saudi/PGA Tour conundrum, or Bank of America creating false accounts and overcharging certain fees. That’s what our news media have mostly evolved to doing. Not all of them, for sure. Most. That’s what attracts the most viewers, which means they can sell advertising time at higher prices, which is how they earn revenue and create value for their owners.
The narrative that bombards you is significantly negative. The narrative, whether intentional or not, is often constructed of opinion and not fact.
Fiat news is the presentation of opinion as fact.
FiatNews.com tracks the density of language strongly related to the expression of an opinion.
We like this method for a couple reasons.
The first, and probably most important, reason is that we think that fiat news is far more widespread than fake news. We also think it can be vastly harder to detect with the naked eye.
We also think our approach is less likely to produce the problem it seeks to solve. Don’t mistake me. It is not perfect. Any language model will be biased by its construction and its training, at least in a technical sense. That’s part of the reason we are calling this a beta launch. We will be updating and improving these models, testing them for both false positives and false negatives over time. But on political and tribal dimensions, we think simply measuring opinion-expressing language is inherently far closer to neutral.
The long-term goal of FiatNews.com is simple. We want citizens to know when someone is trying to tell us how to think.
Source: Rusty Guinn, Epsilon Theory
This graphic represents the density of opinion language related to three topics, as determined by Epsilon Theory’s fiat news dashboard, found here.
I note, as well, that we have only one history and many potential futures. Our brains fear the unknown and crave certainty. Since we can in no way predict the future of just about anything, we have yet one more reason to be negative as to both our current and future states.
Agency and Fulfillment:
Joy Lere covers agency far better than I can, here.
Most people say they want freedom. What they really want is choice and control. The unsexy aspect of autonomy is responsibility. But responsibility is the cost of admission to freedom. When we opt out of ownership, we forfeit agency, and with it, the possibility of creating the life we want.
Joy Lere
Research shows that optimism, agency, and motivation are important factors in a fulfilling life. You can reference some of this work, by Martin Seligman, here.
Eric Barker has some thoughts on this, as well, here.
Here’s how to get happier:
Get Off Autopilot: Too often we’re not thinking; we’re just reacting. We fall into a funk and suppress or avoid bad feelings. Breaking these bad mental habits can feel like trying to un-toast a piece of bread. But first we need to step back and notice them.
Openness: Let the feelings in. It’s not fun but get curious about them. Notice them but don’t get caught up in them. Yes, it’s hard. Not getting caught up in emotions is like trying to play Jenga during an earthquake.
Acceptance: You can’t immediately change bad feelings. But we can accept them. Acknowledge them like you do your crazy uncle. You don’t have to agree but don’t try and shove them away either.
Detachment: Negative emotions can seem like glitter on a craft project gone wrong – they stick around forever. Give them a nickname or just thank your brain. Something to remind you they’re not you. They’re just something that popped up in your brain. And they can float away if you let them.
Act On Your Values: You don’t need to purchase some silly manifesting course that costs more than a black-market kidney. Once the feelings die down, you need to take some action. Move toward being the person you want to be.
You get to change the locks on the front door to you - your brain. If you do not use your agency and consider an alternative view, only being happy when it rains is completely understandable and arguably “normal”. You own two things in life: your brain and your body. Your brain controls your body, so what you really control, unless you let someone else in, and even that is a decision to let someone else take control, is your brain. Taking intentional control over your reactions and decisions is agency.
We are decidedly not only happy when it rains, if we take agency and choose to flourish, both in thought and practice.
Thanks for reading. I hope you are in the midst of an incredible week. Let me know if there is something you’d like me to cover.
Sundry:
The much more talented (than I) Kyla Scanlon covers this same topic as I write this. You can see that here.
My favorite meme this week, from @monacleman1:
While I favor Johnny Cash’s version, Social Distortion’s Ring of Fire is awfully good