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It’s the end of the world as we know it (but I feel fine)
Feb. 26th, 2026 12:05 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
tim_harford_feedHow are you doing? Well, I hope, despite everything. And if you are, then you are just like all the friends and colleagues who sent me messages at Christmas, all of them claiming that they were also doing just fine, also despite everything.
The contradiction here is worth exploring: I’m fine, you’re fine, they’re fine, but this [pauses to gesture vaguely at the universe] is a disaster. It may be because my friends are all fortunate people, shielded from the miseries of reality, and it may be that they are putting a brave face on their secret suffering. But it may also be that there is a curious mismatch between our contentment with our own lives and our despair about the lives of others.
It would be useful to have more systematic data on this mismatch and a decade ago the pollsters Ipsos MORI gathered some. They asked people across 40 countries how many of their fellow citizens would say they were “rather happy” or “very happy”, then compared these guesses with reality as measured by the World Values Survey.
The difference was stark. Most people told Ipsos MORI they were worried about their compatriots’ wellbeing, and yet most people who spoke to the World Values Survey were pretty sunny about their own happiness.
In the US, 90 per cent of people said they were “rather happy” or “very happy”, but guessed that fewer than half of their compatriots felt the same way. The situation was much the same in the UK. In South Korea, again, 90 per cent of people said they were happy — but this near-universal good cheer didn’t stop the Koreans estimating the happiness of other Koreans at 24 per cent.
Canada and Norway were most optimistic in the Ipsos MORI data about the happiness of other people, believing that 60 per cent of their fellow citizens would say they were, at least, “rather happy”. But those cheery guesses were not only lower than the reality in Canada and Norway, they were also more pessimistic than the country with the gloomiest actual outlook, which was Hungary, where 69 per cent of people said they are rather or very happy. This gulf between our individual optimism and our gloominess about others is very wide indeed.
Sadly, Ipsos MORI has not repeated this decade-old exercise but in a recent essay Hannah Ritchie, author of Not the End of the World, has assembled numerous instances of this individual contentment contrasting with pessimism about others.
For example, for about a decade of data in the US, the Federal Reserve has asked people about their own finances, their view of the local economy and their view of the national economy. Year after year, people were much more positive about their own finances than about their local economy and much more positive about their local economy than the country as a whole.
Internationally, residents in almost every nation surveyed were more likely to tell pollsters that 2025 was “a bad year for my country” than to say “it was a bad year for me and my family”. (The exceptions were Singapore and India.) More than 75 per cent of British people said it was a bad year for Britain but fewer than 45 per cent of Brits reckoned it was a bad year for their own family. Likewise for the future: “58 per cent of Brits are optimistic that 2026 will be a better year for them,” explains Ritchie, “but only 32 per cent think that Brits overall will start to feel more optimistic about the country’s long-term future.” I suppose it is logically possible for Britain to have a bad year even while most Brits have a good one, but it seems more likely that the contradiction reflects some kind of glitch in the way we think.
People focus on different issues when assessing how things are going. In late 2024, 32 per cent of British respondents told pollsters that immigration was one of the most important issues facing the country, but only 4 per cent said it was an important issue for them personally.
It is striking that these gaps are so wide and so consistent across topics. So why do they exist and does it matter? The most plausible explanation is our information diet. We may selectively remember or interpret our own experience, but we are at least starting from a (narrow) ground truth.
Take crime. The Crime Survey of England and Wales shows that crime has been falling for decades. For what it’s worth, my own experiences of being a victim of burglary, theft and arson tell the same story — they all took place more than 25 years ago.
Yet somehow when I turn on the evening news, people are still out there doing crimes. The crime rate may be trending downwards but there’s always some newsworthy crime somewhere. Social media probably isn’t helping, either. Hence the weird discourse on X from people (or bots) who have never been to London about how London is a dystopian hellscape.
Beyond the issue of crime, we inevitably get our information about the nation and the wider world through some kind of media, which will always prioritise the dramatic and the controversial. Information about our own lives is largely unmediated.
There is also the question of control. The economist Johannes Spinnewijn once studied the beliefs and behaviour of job seekers and found that, in general, they were too optimistic about their prospects and too pessimistic about their ability to change those prospects. Seeing the world through “baseline optimism and control pessimism”, they expected to find a job quickly, didn’t hustle hard enough, and were disappointed. The minority of people who were pessimistic about the situation but optimistic about being able to change it looked harder and found the next job faster. The paranoid survive.
Spinnewijn’s distinction between baseline optimism and control optimism is useful. When should we feel most optimistic about being able to influence events? Not when rage-tweeting about an outrage on the other side of the world, but when we are acting close to home. Day-to-day reality offers us a chance to be optimistic both about the baseline and about our opportunity to improve it.
Our digital lives push us in the other direction. The destruction of local news and the rise of social media means that our news consumption is increasingly focused on national and global events — precisely the spheres of life where we are gloomiest. This is corrosive. Spend 16 hours doomscrolling and you may well conclude the end times are here; spend 16 hours living your life and things might not seem so bad.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 Jan 2026.
I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.
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