What is the Optimism Gap?

The Optimism Gap is sometimes called the I'm OK-They're Not Syndrome. It's essentially the idea, validated in polls, that most individual people have a pessimistic view of the world-at-large, but an optimistic view of their own lives. Mathematically speaking, a plurality of people perceive their own lives to be above average while believing that a plurality of other people's lives are below average, even though that is statistically impossible in reality.

According to NPR: "Many Americans say they're upbeat and optimistic about their own lives and circumstances. These same people, however, are often pessimistic about the life of the nation as a whole. Public opinion polls consistently reveal this tendency to overstate the country's woes and understate personal problems." [SOURCE]

The optimism gap has its roots in both mainstream and social media, where there is a disproportionate amount of negativity and drama conveyed as compared with actual reality. The news media covers news, defined as things and occurrences that are unusual and out of the ordinary, like plane crashes and murders. But it is the relative rarity of these things that makes them news, by definition. Thousands of planes take off and land each day without incident, but that's not news. Similarly, car crashes occur far more frequently than plane crashes and also kill more people per year, yet they are seldom covered in the news. The end result is that many people who would not think twice about taking a drive in a car are terrified of flying in planes (the interior of a flying plane is actually statistically the SAFEST place you can be...safer than your own home, in fact...). The more mainstream news and social media you consume, the larger your own optimism gap is likely to be!

Consider another example of the optimism gap: Terrorism. It's all the rage on the news and social media. It freaks out a lot of people and makes them irrational and phobic. Again, the reason why is its relative rarity. The math doesn't lie and here's a neat little fact: You are 22 times more likely to die from a rare brain eating microbe than you are from terrorism, in the United States. [SOURCE]

Here's the basic thing to understand about the optimism gap. If you are reading this, your life is pretty good. A lot of people's lives are pretty good. That's not to say some people's lives don't suck or that we shouldn't try to make the world a better place to live. We should. And we have been. The fact is, the world IS a better place to live than it has ever been before in human history, on many metrics of quality of life [SOURCE]. The extent to which you do not believe that is a measure of your individual optimism gap.

The purpose of this blog is to try to narrow the optimism gap by way of individual anecdotes and whatever other tools I have available.

Puppies!

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