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Dec 30, 2020 · But it’s not just the Internet meme machine that thinks 2020 was the worst year ever. Earlier this month, Time magazine ran an extraordinary cover image with a big red X drawn over the number 2020.
Dec 27, 2020 · Most deadly, hottest, most stressful, worst. It is not your imagination: By a host of measures, 2020 was the worst year many Americans will have experienced in their lifetimes. It was a year of ...
- 47 sec
- Reid Wilson
- Overview
- It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
- Why doomscrolling and social media go hand in hand
- Rosy introspection, or less antisocial networking
Unfettered media consumption skews our perception of the present. Here’s how to break the cycle.
Marietta Diaz, 30, who works in medical device sales, sits in her living room in Wellington, Florida, on March 23, 2020, she is in quarantine after testing positive for novel coronavirus (Covid-19). - Diaz has an 8-year-old daughter who starts homeschool next week and shes nervous how it will go. I decided to go to urgent care when I was standing in the OR and I couldnt catch my breath. Watching the news and being someone with anxiety your body can create symptoms. It was a battle in my mind whether is was mental symptoms or viral symptoms. Diaz has received some backlash from people she was in contact with. The backlash Ive received from people was a breaking point for me. People know its out there everywhere, and people are so quick to point a finger at people that have tested positive. But, people are going out on boats and having small get togethers and they could be asymptomatic carriers, Diaz said. Diaz still has 12-days of mandatory quarantine and finds it hard to pass the time. Its difficult being home alone and not being able to exercise or read a book because my head hurts.
In the year 2020, Jenny Eastwood became addicted to bad news. The 26-year-old from Auckland, New Zealand, couldn’t stop checking the narratives of the deadly pandemic, police brutality, protests, conspiracy theories, and politics as each crisis unfolded, particularly half a world away in the United States. Every 10 minutes yielded another dire post on Reddit or Instagram.
“By the middle of the pandemic, I was feeling really flat,” says Eastwood, who works in marketing. “I felt like humanity sucked in general, but I wasn’t able to concentrate on anything, because I’d be constantly thinking about checking the latest updates.”
Like many people, Eastwood had become obsessed with our world’s seemingly increasing danger—a response that has roots in our evolutionary development. Stories of fear and peril pique our anxiety. They put our brains on high alert, an advantage that once protected our early hominid ancestors from predators and natural disasters, but one that now leaves us “doomscrolling,” endlessly refreshing social media and online news to stay abreast of the latest threats. Our hearts race, and our minds keep constant vigil for the next perceived catastrophe. We yearn to feel prepared, so we become addicted to the updates, coming back for more until the world seems far worse than it ever has before.
Plenty of tragedies are happening to keep us glued to our screens. The pandemic has killed more than 860,000 people around the world as of early September—and that number continues to rise even as the crisis calls attention to rampant social and economic inequality. We’ve been battered by record-setting wildfires in California and Australia, an intense Atlantic hurricane season, crop-mangling locust swarms in East Africa, and a massive chemical explosion that obliterated the port of Beirut and killed at least 190 people and caused as much as $15 billion in damage. Protests against police brutality and symbols of Confederate- and colonial-era oppression have brought millions of people to the streets the world over. As if all of this wasn’t enough, it’s also a highly divisive election year in the United States.
Our ancestors might disagree that 2020 is the worst year on record. Sure, frightening things are happening, but many of those things happened in the past, too, including the 1918 flu pandemic, during which 50 million people died. Plus, the belief that civilization is on the decline is a tradition as old as civilization itself. Even Ancient Athenians complained in the fifth century B.C. that their democracy wasn’t what it used to be. These days, we call that belief “declinism,” or “decline bias.”
Before the pandemic, a majority of Americans already believed the country was going downhill. About 60 percent of respondents thought that the nation’s influence on the world was decreasing, according to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center. Only 12 percent of the people who responded to the poll were “very optimistic” about the country’s future, while 31 percent were “somewhat pessimistic” and 13 percent were “very pessimistic” about America’s future.
Now, Americans might feel worse about the future than they did before, especially because stay-at-home orders and isolation have been affecting our mental health, which in turn increases the likelihood that we’ll see the world through the lens of negativity bias.
In Western culture, people already have a propensity to interpret present events negatively and tend to prefer the past, according to the research of Carey Morewedge, a professor of marketing at Boston University. That is because our autobiographical memories are biased toward positivity. When we think about the past, we tend to remember positive experiences. This is sometimes called “rosy retrospection,” or “nostalgia bias.”
“If I’m thinking, for example, about how much I love going to baseball games, I’m not going to recall the times when my team lost,” Morewedge says. “We’re judging the past on its greatest hits, but we judge the present on everything we have available.”
We’re judging the past on its greatest hits, but we judge the present on everything we have available.
Shocking almost no one, excessive news consumption causes stress. According to a 2017 survey by the American Psychological Association, respondents who kept up with the news cycle reported lost sleep, stress, anxiety, fatigue, and other negative mental health symptoms. The same survey found as many as 20 percent of Americans constantly monitor their social media feeds for updates, and one in 10 check the news every hour.
Although it seems like the news today is more shocking than ever, the idea that media consumption negatively affects our perception of the world is nothing new. In 1968, an ambitious investigation kicked off at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Called the Cultural Indicators Project, it became one of the first comprehensive studies of the influence of television on the attitudes and perceptions of American viewers. The study, led by the school’s dean, George Gerbner, found a direct correlation between time spent watching television and the likelihood that the watcher will perceive the world as more frightening or dangerous, a phenomenon he called the “mean world syndrome.”
Gerber found that viewers who watch violent television shows typically believe violence is common in reality. This fell in line with his “cultivation theory,” which hypothesized that the more television people watch, the more they begin to believe that television mirrors reality instead of being stylized for dramatic effect.
Modern research has continued to reinforce these ideas, but the effects aren’t always negative. It all depends on the medium of consumption and how you use it, according to Mesfin Awoke Bekalu, a research scientist who studies the relationship between social media and public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Bekalu warns us not to conflate the effects of social media with previous research on television consumption. Unlike watching television, which is a passive activity, engaging on social media requires active participation, which means studying its effects is much more complicated. On the positive side, social media can offer its users emotional and social support, which some users have found indispensable during the pandemic. However, social media can also cause us to experience the “displacement effect,” a phenomenon in which mental activity takes the place of a physical human need.
“Lurking,” or scrolling through updates posted by friends or strangers without engaging, tends to have negative psychological effects.
Psychologists say we may never see the present as perfect, but we can learn to control our biases. The first step is to acknowledge how the media we consume shifts our perceptions. It gives our panic-prone primate brains more reasons to feel stressed and more examples of the present to compare with our highly edited version of the past. When we are mindful of our thought patterns, we can take control of them, and give ourselves a reality check, says Morewedge.
“We need to be mindful of the kind of social network we are in, who we are engaging with, and what kinds of content we consume,” cautions Bekalu. “Social media can make us perceive the present as worse than the past, but that isn’t true for everyone.”
To get control of your nostalgia bias, take a more realistic view of history and really compare it with the present. The pandemic is scary, but at least you’re not a medieval peasant with the bubonic plague around every corner and with no understanding of how germs work.
Put the present into perspective by taking stock in what we do have, too. We are making progress socially and scientifically, and research teams around the world are working on vaccines for the coronavirus, a feat that wouldn’t have been possible even a hundred years ago.
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In the balance of global power, 2020 has seen a shifting of the plates. To watch America's response was to witness its national decline play out in real-time. The Trump administration's management ...
Dec 5, 2020 · Because face it: humans can often be terrible, making rash, selfish decisions at best and murdering one another at worst. Through most of 2020, to be locked inside and looking out was to feel ...
- 4 min
- Gaslighting has been a major feature of American civic life since 2016,but in 2020 it reached new heights of outlandishness,making many of us feel as if we’d been pushed to the other side of the looking glass. We spent countless hours stuck at home,connected to the often untrustworthy hive mind of social media,wringing our hands,pointing out injustices,only to end up feeling even more paralyzed by the very people who are meant to protect us. The enemy sought to divide us,,succeeded.
Dec 26, 2020 · The year 2020 will undoubtedly go down in history as the worst year ever — at least to those of us living in it. It started with Australia on fire. By March, 46 million acres, an area roughly the size of Syria, had burned, destroying the habitats of more than 800 vertebrate species alone. The fires took the homes and lives of many people as ...
Dec 29, 2020 · No, most of us would have our own nominees for the annus horribilis . Starting, of course, with 2020. "In my lifetime, this is the worst year," said Philip Dolce, professor of history at Bergen ...
