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Step 52: «Do not destroy an entire garden when the only thing that is withered is a single flower»
The 88 rungs of happy people
In this chapter of “The 88 Steps of Happy People” I teach you how to look with more optimism
What is the number one ingredient of happiness? The optimism. And what does the world inject us the most? Just the opposite.
This Step focuses on combating pessimism, at least that which the media insists on floating in the air wherever we go. I’m going to ask you a question, and if you read the press, the normal thing is that you fail it.
What is the period of history in which… less hunger has been spent, better health has been, less illiteracy has been registered, fewer wars have been, and finally, higher rates of happiness have been achieved? Answer: surprisingly… NOW!
– Anxo, how can you say something like that? Haven’t you seen the news lately?
Curiously, I have not seen them because I do not have a television (I have never had), but calm, I am aware that the vast majority of the news is not bad, but terrible. The reason that explains it is simple: the negative sells. Imagine for a moment a headline that said: “Breaking News: More than 10.000 Billion People Have Not Committed Suicide Yesterday.” Or this other one: “No plane in the last XNUMX flights has crashed.” Who would buy something like that? So when there are millions of safe flights, no one mentions them, and as soon as one crashes, no one stops doing it. The problem is not that the bad is exaggerated, but that we generalize its impact, confusing perception with reality.
One of the Nobel laureates I have the most respect for, Daniel Kahneman, wrote about this phenomenon and called it the “availability heuristic.” What he comes to say is that we enlarge what we listen to the most (by being more available, closer), and we shrink what we listen to less. For example, if terrorism fell to all-time lows and there had been a single large-scale terrorist attack in the last decade, a few days later when you asked several random people on the street, “At what point in history has it been the longest? How serious is the problem of terrorism? ‘, most likely the wrong answer was’ now’. That’s the danger of generalizing around an exception.
Therefore, the teaching of this Step is as follows. From now on, before you rush to be alarmist and pessimistic and conclude that a certain fact indicates that we are facing a very serious problemAsk yourself this question: is this fact representative or isolated? And he understands that, in order for it to be classified as representative, it must be part of a chain of previous facts or indications. When isolated, it may be terrible, but it is an exception, so save yourself the pessimism.
If you do cover your teenager with a cigarette, do something about it, but don’t conclude that he or she is a drug addict. If a hater trashes your work on social media, contrast him with how many applaud him. If a politician steals, do not conclude that neither is honest. If your country suffers an attack, conclude that it is something serious, but not that the world will never be safe again. If a tsunami devastates an entire city in the other part of the world, send a donation, but do not determine that natural disasters will end the world. Why? Because they are all isolated facts and not representative of your conclusion. Can you imagine concluding that if today is a black day, then the whole year as well, or worse, that if today there is the most destructive of storms it means that it will never be sunny again?
@Angel
# 88