How Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can help us remain hopeful in difficult times
I am generally a very positive person, but lately even I have been struggling to stay upbeat in light of major cuts to healthcare spending and academic research, larger economic trends that are making it harder for people to find good jobs and afford housing and groceries, and the unpredictable and threatening ways that artificial intelligence (AI) stands to change our world. So, I decided to finally start reading a book that has been on my list for years, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I love nonfiction - I even have a baseball cap a friend gave me that says “Nonfiction” (he runs Yale’s Windham-Campbell literary Prizes). But this book has been on my list for almost 15 years because it’s over 800 pages long. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
The Better Angels chronicles the historical and archeological record to prove that, no matter how dire things may feel, we are objectively markedly less violent and more empathetic than we ever have been. The homicide rate among nearly all traditional peoples worldwide is a whopping 14%, compared to about 6% in the US today. Even this latter number is misleading, as the rate varies significantly state-to-state. Here in New York, it’s just above 4%. Wars are also less common than they have been and less deadly. We are more empathetic. I was surprised to learn that every culture has been shown to engage in torture. Pinker painstakingly describes how commonplace torture was for much of Western history, which really drives home how far we have come. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, though it’s certainly no guarantee. The Better Angels has been really helping me cling to my optimistic outlook.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaches that we can choose how to look at any situation - perhaps not the first thought that pops into our head, but to some degree we have control over which thoughts we give life. So, we should choose thoughts that help us. I take this very seriously, personally, and it heavily informs the work I do with patients. Your friend didn’t accept your dinner invitation- What’s the most helpful believable story you can tell yourself? It’s much more helpful to believe their excuse that they’re busy than that they think you’re a bore. This can be applied at the micro-level as well as the macro-level. I often worry about climate change, but try to remember that around the turn of the 20th century some thinkers were panicked about the accrual of horse manure in New York City as the population rose, unable to foresee that in just a short time there would be a paradigmatic shift to automobiles. Neil deGrasse-Tyson says that humans greatly struggle to conceptualize exponential growth of the sort that technological advancements, including AI, might spur.
I recently heard a quote: “Cynicism is always stupid.” I worry slightly people might feel hurt or take offense to that language, but it spoke to me. It’s easy to feel hopeless and overwhelmed. There is so much suffering in this world. But how does hopelessness help? Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can help us stay cautiously optimstic so that we are informed citizens and active participants in solutions to the problems we face.