Turns out this planet we live on is chock full of optimists:
Eighty-nine percent of individuals worldwide expect the next five years to be as good or better than their current life, and 95 percent of individuals expected their life in five years to be as good or better than their life was five years ago.
“These results provide compelling evidence that optimism is a universal phenomenon,” said Matthew Gallagher, a psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas and lead researcher of the study.
At the country level, optimism is highest in Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, and New Zealand and lowest in Zimbabwe, Egypt, Haiti and Bulgaria. The United States ranks number 10 on the list of optimistic countries.
Demographic factors (age and household income) appear to have only modest effects on individual levels of optimism.
Although it is much maligned by “serious” thinkers who tend towards a vaguely pessimistic or cyncial outlook, optimism is in fact an important survival trait both for individuals and the species as a whole. As we have observed, the whole of human history consists of people trying to improve the human condition — whether for themselves as individuals, for various groups (big or small) with which they identify, or for all of humanity. The compounding effect of benefits derived from improvement upon improvement is the driver of all human progress.
This constant motion forward is almost certainly what saved us from extinction 70,000 years ago — and probably at other critical junctures along the way. Among the 2,000 or so human beings alive on the planet 70,000 years ago, there were no doubt a few who had a “realistic” take on humanity’s chances. They probably argued that the best thing to do would be to leave behind as many detailed cave paintings as possible so that whoever came next would have a better appreciation of who we were. Fortunately, others had very different expectations for our future.
Of course, it wasn’t the expectation of a better future itself that did the trick; it was the actions we took. It’s those incremental improvements that make all the difference.
But what would motivate us to make those improvements if we were conviced, or even pretty sure, that they would not work? While we need a measure of uncertainty to keep the whole thing interesting, just as we need a certain level of risk aversion to keep us from doing too many stupid things (or even just one thing enabled by an extinction-causing level of stupidity), on the whole, the more positive our expectation of the results of our efforts, the more likely we are to continue with them.
Even if this were not the case, its easy to see why optimism would be positively correlated with survival. Producing offspring is an inherently optimistic act. Throughout history, optimists have probably been likelier than pessimists to have children. Optimists would also tend to have larger numbers of children. It’s no wonder most of the people alive on the planet today are optimists: the pessimists just can’t keep up.