Collective Pessimism

Collective pessimism: an act of responding to a global issue in a pessimistic way which done by a large group of people.

Human are all pessimistic in some extent. This keeps us survive the harsh reality of life: choosing the right path over the wrong one, picking a true love over a toxic relationship, working a nine-to-five job instead of lying on our beds all day long.

In individual level, the results of being pessimistic come in a short-term period and experienced by only a singular person or a little group of people. The consequences are so visible to our eyes, touchable to our skins, that we could see and feel it coming in daily basis.

On top of that, this pessimism is so little compared to how we feel about our capabilities. We might feel doubtful if we will get the job we applied for, but we silently believe that we can send another thousands of applications to other thousands companies. We know we could do it despite of difficulties we might encounter through the journey. It is the confidence that makes the doubt less significant.

But, when it comes to a major challenge, things mentioned above are lost. The results are long-term, and experienced by almost the entire planet earth’s residence. So, we put zero optimism to ourselves, believing that there’s nothing important we could do compared to this big pessimism following this big problem.

We say things like, “the governments are taking care of that;” “environmentalists are working on this;” “someone’s doing something.” We are so optimistic that other people are tackling this issue, yet we are so pessimistic about ourselves taking roles in it, not knowing that six billions of people are thinking the same way, leaving only one billion who either too young, too poor, or too sick to think.

We say even worse expressions like, “it’s doomsday;” “we’re cursed;” “we’ll die anyway;” “we’re moving to Mars.”

In other words, collective pessimism is billions groups of people in line, waiting to be killed by the worsening problem they refuse to take responsibility of.

It seems like, we are so impatient to see the death, to witness the destruction of our one and only home, that we don’t even want to get our hands dirty with unnecessary little tiny efforts to save our own planet.

We don’t even bother doing the least we could do: 

being optimistic.