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The most infuriating TikTok I’ve ever seen

If you’re part of finance twitter, economics twitter, politics twitter, or anything like that, you may have seen the Tweet/TikTok below:

Scott Seiss, a progressive who became famous for his rants about working a retail job, makes the claim that people are having fewer kids now because “it’s so expensive” and “people can’t afford to have kids anymore”.

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This is just patently false. Take a look at the chart below:

Our fertility rate has been falling for decades. But do you know when it has shot up? During recessions and other disasters. During the 1918 influenza, births shot up. The start of the Great Depression saw a small bump up in fertility, counteracting the steady decline in fertility rate that occurred throughout the very prosperous 1920s. When the global housing market collapsed in 2008, people had more babies, not fewer!

In fact, Seiss has the causal chain entirely backward. People aren’t having fewer children because they’re poorer; they’re having fewer kids because they’re wealthier! Across the world, people have fewer children as they become richer:

And, despite the doomsaying from many on the progressive left and regressive right, we as a country are wealthier than we have been for most of American history! The US Census Bureau shows that real (read: adjusted for inflation) personal incomes are higher for every year other than 2018. We live in great times!

Why does everything feel so bad if it’s not?

A recent Washington Post article speaks to this issue quite a bit. Whether it’s true or not (hint: it’s not), people are convinced that now is one of the worst times to be alive in the last century. Take a look at the charts below:

Some of these are insane! Let’s take a closer look:

• 60% of those polled believe that now is the time with the most political division, and not the time when the National Guard gunned down protestors on college campuses and riots took place outside of the DNC

• 40% believe the current year is the one with the most crime, and not the years that the Mob ran New York, or the years of regular crime waves in most American cities

• Over 30% believe that our economy is worse now than it was during the Great Depression.

• Almost 1 in 5 believe that we have worse racial equality now than we did during Jim Crow or the Rodney King riots.

But there appears to be a reason, and it’s almost entirely based on chance

The same Washington Post article breaks out responses by age, and there’s an interesting trend made obvious: the year you were born weighs heavily on your perception of the best time to be alive. Take a look at the charts below:

It’s pretty clear from the above graphic that you are overwhelmingly more likely to prefer the fashion and entertainment that was prominent when you were a teen.

But this extends beyond just fashion and entertainment. It also influences how you likely feel about the economic, moral, and social state of our country. Take a look:

You’re most likely to think our society was the most moral and our communities were the most close-knit when you were a child, unexposed to immoral content and constantly engaging with your community via school and church and the like.

You’re also most likely to think that news reporting was the most reliable and the economy was the best when you were around 10 years old and not consuming any significant information from the news or thinking at all about the economy.

Columbia professor Adam Mastroianni writes in one academic paper: “our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced.”

In short, we constantly think things are getting worse, even when they are quantifiably getting better!

Our opinions are based off of the vibes of our youth compared to the vibes of our adult lives, and not reality.

When we base our opinions on vibes, we’re wrong more often than we’re right

The horror continues. Almost half of Democrats and even more Independents/ Republicans believe that we’re currently in a recession, which is fundamentally untrue.

And even more believe that inflation is increasing, despite it being on the downtrend since June of 2022:

Studies also show that our views of the economy change significantly as the party in power in Washington, DC changes. When Biden was elected, Republicans became pessimists while Democrats became significantly more optimistic:

Our childhoods and our political affiliations drive our perceptions of reality, causing us to form opinions, take action, and vote in elections based on imagined realities that don’t exist.

When this happens, we make bad choices, we select bad candidates, and we put our money in stupid “investments” like Dogecoin and GameStop. The system is rigged, right? Why not gamble it all and give the man the middle finger?

So what do we do about it?

There’s been a lot of discussion about these issues on social media over the past week, but not nearly enough talk about the way forward.

In that same Washington Post article, there are clues about what it might look like.

People seem to overwhelmingly believe today is the worst time to be alive by many metrics, until you ask them when they would prefer to be alive. Take a look:

While there’s some variation, the trend is pretty clear: significant portions of most populations, if not pluralities, prefer to live in this decade than any other. A person can complain about how bad things might seem compared to our past, but the second they are asked when they want to live, the past looks a little less rosy.

That’s because it’s easy to complain about abstract issues like “the economy” or “political division”, but it’s much more difficult to complain about specific issues when you compare them to the specific issues of the past.

• Climate change might make you wish for the past, at least until you consider the rampant smoking and the regular smog infestations in many urban areas

• Social inequality might have you downcast, at least until you consider

We constantly oversimplify the past to compare it with our complex present, resulting in the view that “The world is awful.” But we stop short of having any real context against which to compare our present moment.

A much better approach is to take that sentence and tack two more on, resulting in the following phrase used by Our World In Data:

The solution isn’t to pretend that there aren’t real issues that people face; it’s to give those issues context. Molehills can easily look like mountains until the moment you compare them to an actual mountain.

It’s not ignorance, but gratitude that’s the key. Gratitude for how far we have come as a society, and how much better we have it than our ancestors.

In his incredible book Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg explains:

How often have you heard that things are bad right now, and the problem is the government/the billionaires/the immigrants/the Jews? These claims are the product not of reality but of ingratitude. They are the product of the rose-tinted lenses through which we view our childhoods, and of the gray, eternally pessimistic lenses through which we view our present lives.

It doesn’t help that nearly every major player in our news and political environment is incentivized to lie to us. Will Stancil, a talking head who helped popularize the term “vibecession” (originated by economics writer Kyla Scanlon) highlights one such case below:

Politicians are incentivized to tell us that our country is broken because it lets them tell us how they alone can fix it. Ad-driven news outlets are incentivized to spread panic as that’s what gets people to open their articles. And we are incentivized to tell ourselves that this is some systemic problem because it allows us to abdicate responsibility for the preservation of the world that we live in. It manifests as us asking questions like:

• “The economy is rigged, there’s no point in trying to get ahead.”

• “There’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism!”

• “Corporations do all the polluting, why should I recycle?”

• “Google is spying on me anyway, why should I care if the CCP knows everything about me and my preferences?”

This sort of political and economic nihilism lets us sit back and blame others for what we dislike about our current world. And it lets others with financial or political motives take advantage of our fears to get ahead, worsening reality for all of us in the process.

The conclusion of Goldberg’s book paints the picture clearly:

We can choose between progress or decay; there is no in between. But first, we need to address the problem of pessimism that makes progress itself impossible.

The solution isn’t a political one—the solution to our vibecessions and our doomerisms is a deeply personal one. It’s each of us making the choice to have gratitude for our station in life, understand that the world used to be so much worse, and dedicating ourselves to actively preserving the miracle that is our modern world and its institutions.

That means working to understand when your emotions are being manipulated by the media. It means taking the initiative to question your politicians about the reality behind the ads they run against their opponents. It means not lurching at political narratives that play into your fears and biases.

And it means working to elevate the conversation constantly by showing and living the proof that we live in good times.

If cynicism can be contagious, so can determined optimism.

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