Is It Wrong to Bring a Child Into This World? - Part II

Introduction

As I described in my last post, I am at the time of life when some of my friends have kids of child-rearing age, and once in a while I’ll hear one say, whether quoting their kids or expressing their own sentiment or both, “It just seems wrong to bring a child into this world.” Notwithstanding my complete respect for those who choose not to procreate, this notion riles me up.

I did some research to make sure the “just seems wrong” argument isn’t merely a fringe thing. And as I mentioned last week, it turns out that a large Pew survey found that a lot of people hold this view. In fact, 38% of respondents aged 18-49 cited “concerns about the state of the world, other than the environment” as a main reason they don’t want kids, and 26% cited “concerns about the environment.” My research also turned up, again and again, the “antinatalist” movement that holds that it’s always wrong, from an ethical perspective, to bring a child into the world, regardless of circumstance.

Last week, after providing some background on how overpopulation isn’t the bugaboo we all thought it was, I analyzed the environmental and ethical perspectives of the “is it wrong” question. In this post I will take on the “concerns about the state of the world” position, which is the one that vexes me the most.

Before we begin…

Yes, this post is a polemic, like last week’s. My ideal audience is anybody who googles “Is it wrong to bring a child into this world?” and believes, or at least suspects, that it is. But I’m not here to put down anyone who believes this, or is beginning to; after all, there’s no shortage of current events to be worried about. Meanwhile, I’m also at the age where some friends and family are starting to fantasize about grandchildren, and aren’t always subtle about pressuring their adult children to get going.

I am totally fine with those who, for personal reasons, just don’t want kids. And that’s a lot of them: it’s the number one reason given by respondents to the Pew poll, in the 18-49 age group, for opting out. Here are the top five:

1. Just don’t want to – 57%
2. Want to focus on other things – 44%
3. Concerns about the state of the world – 38%
4. Can’t afford to raise a child – 36%
5. Concerns about the environment – 26%

If a person is being challenged about not procreating and cites the first, second, or fourth reason, he or she is opening the door to a debate about his or her priorities, which could be unpleasant—I’ve witnessed and even fielded accusations of selfishness (before I had kids, obviously). This is truly offensive, and I can appreciate the temptation to advance a more principled position—and take the fight to the other person’s turf—by citing the state of the world. And I can imagine a parent of my generation hearing this concern from his or her grown-up offspring, and accepting the negative perspective without kicking the tires very hard. But what if that offspring is advancing the idea tentatively—and maybe even hoping, on some level, to hear it refuted?

What a shame it would be succumb to anxiety, and actually conclude it’s wrong in principle to procreate right now … especially when this position is pure nonsense. In this post I will argue that a) now is not a historically bad time to bring a child into the world, and b) barring a zombie apocalypse, Terminator-style AI takeover, or nuclear winter, it’s never a bad time to bring a child into the world.

Our world is not that bad

To begin with, rumors of the demise of freedom, democracy, human rights, safety, and economic opportunity are greatly exaggerated. How can I so smugly state this? Because they’ve always been exaggerated. As I’ve described before in these pages, humans have a built-in, evolutionarily encoded impulse to focus on the negative. Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician and statistician, examined this in his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. This book explains why a vast range of people—including scientists, executives of multinational companies, journalists, medical researchers, attendees of the Davos World Economic Forum, and others—have historically done really poorly on a multiple-choice test about the state of the world. In fact, people do worse than if they guessed at random; as Rosling explains, they’re “systematically wrong.” Out of nearly 12,000 people tested in 14 countries in 2017, “every group of people … thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.” I myself took this quiz, years ago, and got like a 3 out of 13. I hadn’t thought I was that ignorant or that negative, but that’s kind of how cognitive bias works. But wait—don’t leave! This doesn’t mean I’m an idiot who doesn’t deserve your attention: the average score across those 12,000 people was a mere 2.

This bias toward negativity is exacerbated, Rosling explains, by “selective reporting by journalists and activists”—which accentuates the negative to create a sense of urgency. (Read this, quick! Donate now!) Meanwhile, Rosling points out, people may feel that it’s heartless to acknowledge that the world is improving when there is still so much wrong with it. Fair enough, but it’s also heartless to be complicit with the rabble-rousing algorithms designed to make people as anxious as possible.

Not only is the world not that bad, but it’s almost certainly in better shape now than when you were born. “What?!” you may ask. “How can you assert that when you don’t even know me, so you don’t even know when I was born?” The answer is: because the world has been improving all along, so my assertion is true no matter how old you are.

To support this audacious claim, I’m going to compare 2026 to three historical snapshots: the birth years of my mother-in-law, of myself, of and my first child. Three sequential generations. You’re going to laugh at how much better things are for the kid lucky enough to be born today.

1932 — The year of my mother-in-law’s birth

I chose the birth year of my mother-in-law, rather than that of my own mom, because my mother-in-law is older—in fact, she’s among the oldest 1% of living humans globally, maybe even the oldest 0.5%, so she’s among albertnet’s most elderly potential readers. And here’s the America she was born into, broken down by some of the biggest concerns people have today about our world’s fitness for bringing up children:

• Economy: 1932 was arguably the single worst year of the Great Depression. There was 25% unemployment, and without any social safety net, unemployment generally led to immediate destitution. Over 9,000 American banks had failed.
• Geopolitics: In Germany, unemployment had hit 30% and economic desperation was fueling the rise of the Nazi party, by now the largest in Germany. Adolph Hitler would become chancellor within a year.
• Disease: There was no polio vaccine, no antibiotics, and no vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella, or chickenpox. Tuberculosis was still a leading killer. In the US, infant mortality was roughly 60 per 1,000 live births in 1932—compared to about 5.4 today.

Just imagine if my mother-in-law’s parents had contemplated the state of the world and were in a position to decide whether or not to have a baby. I mean, her dad had a job crushing rocks (to make gravel). Fate did me a huge favor there, as my mother-in-law went on to have a happy childhood and is still enjoying a long, satisfying adulthood after having four beautiful children, one of whom became my wife. If you were to ask my mother-in-law today if the circumstances of her birth put her in a deep existential hole she never managed to climb out of, she’d laugh in your face.

1969 — The year of my birth

I was the last of four boys born to my parents, and—birth control having been readily available—was not an accident. My mom and dad conceived me with full knowledge that their world was seriously messed up:

• Geopolitics: 1969 was the peak year of American troops in Vietnam, with over half a million deployed. The draft was in effect, meaning virtually every young man in the country faced the possibility of being sent to fight in a war with no clear end.
• Political dysfunction: The year before, 1968, had seen the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; police attacking anti-war protesters at the Democratic National Convention; and widespread urban riots. Nixon had just taken office under a cloud of suspicion that would culminate in Watergate. The previous year’s Tet Offensive had shattered public trust in the government’s honesty about the war.
• National safety: The Cold War was at a sustained peak. Both the US and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear warheads to destroy civilization multiple times over, and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction was widely bandied about.
• Economy: Inflation was famously bad in 1969, at 6.1%—a shocking and disheartening rate after two decades of price stability. The Federal Reserve responded by increasing interest rates sharply, which pushed America toward a long and stubborn recession. Americans had no idea they were on the cusp of one of the great bull markets in American history; they saw only inflation, a growing recession, an expensive war with no end in sight, and a deeply divided country.
• Crime: the murder rate was heading toward what would become the worst era of American violent crime in modern history, peaking at 10.4 per 100,000 in 1980—more than double today’s rate.
• Culture: Within a month of my birth, the TV show “Hee Haw” premiered. And my father actually watched it. These were dark times indeed.

2001 — The year of my first child’s birth

The year 2001, and those following it, were not halcyon days for America. And yet it never occurred to my wife and me not to have kids, based on then-current events. In fact, if you were to have asked us to explain our pro-procreation rationale as concisely as possible, we’d have gotten it down to a single word: “Duh.” And yet, here’s what was going on in our world:

• Terrorism: September 11, 2001—the deadliest terrorist attack in America’s history—killed nearly 3,000 people and triggered a governmental response that fundamentally changed America’s approach to security and surveillance. The anthrax letters that followed killed 5 and infected 17 others, raising fears of biological warfare on American soil. The sense that the homeland was no longer safe was entirely new and profoundly destabilizing psychologically.
• Economy: The dot-com bubble had burst in March of 2000, wiping out trillions in wealth, and by 2001 the US economy was in deep recession. This was worsened by 9/11, which caused the stock market to fall 7.1% on its first day of trading after the attacks.
• Political dysfunction: The country was bitterly divided over a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court, which halted a recount in Florida. The Court’s ruling was so unusual that it explicitly stated it should not be cited as precedent—an extraordinary statement to make. Suffice to say this decision struck a great many Americans as scandalous.
• Geopolitics: The US was on the verge of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but with no clear target or objective identified. The world suddenly felt dangerous in ways it hadn’t since the Cold War.

Granted, my first child was conceived before the attack on the World Trade Center. But did my wife and I regret for one moment bringing her into that world? Not at all. After all, we decided, with eyes wide open, to have another child two years later, even though by then unemployment had hit its peak and my own employer had gone bankrupt.

I hope I’ve compellingly suggested that every generation has been born into conditions that could, by the “concerns about the state of the world” logic, have argued for not procreating—and yet my mother-in-law, her daughter, your humble blogger, and my children are all glad we’re here. And since the dates of our respective births, so much about the world has improved. Here are some highlights:

• Today, infant mortality is eleven times lower than it was in the year of my mother-in-law’s birth. If that doesn’t make this a better time to have children, what does?
• Violent crime has fallen more than 50% since its early 1990s peak, and property crime has fallen almost the same amount, according to FBI statistics.
• Since the year of my first daughter’s birth, the economy has boomed; despite 9/11, two wars, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and a pandemic, the stock market in 2026 is worth roughly six times what it was in 2001. If we go back to 1969, parents afraid of market conditions would deprive a child of the opportunity to partake in 30-fold S&P 500 growth over the next 57 years (adjusted for inflation, with dividends reinvested).
• The world demonstrated an unprecedented capability to respond to a crisis, that being the COVID-19 pandemic. As aptly recounted here, an amazing collaboration took place between the biotech industry and various governments. Based on groundbreaking innovation and a largely unprecedented willingness to accelerate regulatory approval, a vaccine was developed in less than 12 months. This shattered the previous record, which was the mumps vaccine in the 1960s, which took about four years. A 2025 study published in JAMA Health Forum, a publication of the American Medical Association, estimates that the COVID-19 vaccines saved 2.5 million lives. I cannot imagine what would have happened had COVID hit back in 2001.

Still worried about politics?

If you’re still rejecting my assertions about the state of the world, perhaps your position is largely political. After all, politics is probably the most divisive force informing the national mood right now. So I’m going to tackle that, but don’t worry—I won’t take a side. (As described here, I think partisan bickering is pointless and not the purpose of albertnet.) Instead, let’s imagine a political change that I think we can all agree would be disastrous: what if we lost the right to free speech? And how about another: what if we fell under tyrannical Communist rule? Would I then concede that it’s wrong to bring a child into this world?

My answer is an emphatic “No.” Because if we decided, on the basis of Communist tyranny and the lack of free speech, that it was wrong to have children, we’d also be saying it’s been wrong for anyone in China to have had a baby in the last 77 years, or anyone in Russia for most of the last 109. We’d be saying it was wrong for my college roommate to have been given a chance at life: he was born into an authoritarian monarchy in Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries on earth; lived through a Communist revolution and one of the most brutal regimes in African history; was labeled an “enemy of the state” as a teenager who dared to speak out; escaped to America; and is now thriving and raising a family. Do you want to tell couples in less privileged countries than ours that it’s immoral for them to have kids?

Which brings me to my final point: the intrinsic absurdity of basing the decision of a lifetime on a snapshot in time.

A failure of perspective

Let’s do a quick thought exercise. Let’s suppose my wife and I had been thinking about starting a family a couple years earlier, in 1999, so we did an assessment then of the state of the world. The Dow had just closed above 10,000, and then 11,000, for the first time in history. The NASDAQ produced a mind-boggling 85.6% annual return. Unemployment hit its lowest level in 30 years. The federal government posted a $125 billion budget surplus — its second consecutive surplus after 30 years of deficits. Geopolitically, the Cold War had been over for a decade, the Soviet Union was gone, and democracy was spreading globally. It might have seemed like the perfect time to bring a child into the world—and yet within just a couple of years all this had collapsed. A child born in 1999 would be less than a year old when the NASDAQ began its catastrophic slide, losing three quarters of its value over the next couple of years. My kid would have been two years old on 9/11; three years old when WorldCom became the largest bankruptcy in American history after massive accounting fraud; and four years old when the US invaded Iraq and unemployment peaked at it post-recession high. So basing the decision to procreate on favorable conditions no more guarantees a happy life for your child than rough times portend a fraught one.

This is the folly of taking a snapshot in time and assuming it will set the tone of a person’s life for the next 70, 80, maybe 90 years. A child born today will live until roughly 2100 … who could possibly say what will happen between now and then? Think back to my mother-in-law’s life … she has lived through a crazy mixed bag of good and bad, from the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, the 1970s stagflation, the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and COVID-19—but also the defeat of Axis imperialism, the creation of the polio vaccine, the Civil Rights act and Voting Rights act, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the eradication of smallpox (which had killed millions), the previously unimaginable access to information made possible by the Internet, the development of mRNA vaccines and unprecedented speed of the COVID vaccine, and the dramatic global decline in extreme poverty—more people lifted out of poverty in her lifetime than in all the rest of human history combined.

My takeaway? Looking at current events and deciding not to have kids is simply a failure of perspective. Basing an irreversible decision on what you read on your phone or hear on your podcast is not clear-headed risk assessment—it’s an anxiety response dressed up as moral reasoning. Again, I don’t blame you for feeling anxious. I just find it unsupportable to convert that anxiety into a judgment like “it’s wrong to bring a child into this world.”

A final note

I want to reiterate that I’m not trying to promote procreation—I am completely fine with “I choose not to,” and object merely to “no one should.” I am willing to work very hard to understand another’s perspective, so long as it’s not some froot-loopy moral judgment. Let me give you an example. I’ll confess I was somewhat flippant when my daughter announced she would never be a mother. I said something like, “It’s natural that at age 22 you’re not ready for parenting,” and intimated that her biological clock may one day cause her to change her mind. She seemed inordinately irritated by this response, I felt at first, but I finally understood her perspective when I read this passage in one of her college papers (for a philosophy class, on a non-procreation topic):

If I heard my parents talking about the messiness and inhuman effort of raising a child and I said I certainly wouldn’t go the same way they would laugh, and respond, “Just you wait till those hormones kick in.” It was as if they wished destruction upon me in the form of chemicals that would override reason and change my conception of self, that iron necessity to do what I did not want, justified because I’d become someone who desired it.

I call that “owning it.” She’s not afraid to answer the question for herself, not for the world. I think we can all respect that … right?

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Firewall for the Mind

Introduction

I recently read a compelling New York Times opinion piece by David Brooks called “The Self-Destructive Effects of Progressive Sadness.” It discusses the growing darkness of the national mood, which Brooks terms “maladaptive sadness,” and which he attributes to three trends: a catastrophizing mentality; extreme sensitivity to harm; and a culture of denunciation. The result, the author contends, is a decrease in one’s sense of agency, which causes emotional duress that can eventually lead to sadness and anxiety.

I was hoping the article would suggests ways we can work to mitigate this problem, but it didn’t get into it—that’s a whole other article. This post is me taking a swing at that other article.

Pay attention … or not

I believe the solution to this maladaptive sadness begins with deciding where and how—and, crucially, if—to focus our attention.

Let’s start with the catastrophizing mentality. Humans do have a talent for focusing on the negative. The late Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician and statistician, examined this in his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. This book explains why the vast majority of people—including scientists, executives of multinational companies, journalists, medical researchers, attendees of the Davos World Economic Forum, and others—have historically done really poorly on a multiple-choice test about the state of the world. In fact, people do worse than if they guessed at random; as Rosling explains, they’re “systematically wrong.” Out of nearly 12,000 people tested in 14 countries in 2017, “every group of people … thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.” Rosling identified ten key reasons people err, and one of them is “the negativity instinct.” To some degree, we’re hardwired for pessimism, which is exacerbated, Rosling explains, by “selective reporting by journalists and activists”—which accentuates the negative to create a sense of urgency. (Read this, quick! Donate now!) Meanwhile, he points out, people may feel that it’s heartless to acknowledge that the world is improving when there is still so much wrong with it. But then, naysaying doesn’t help, particularly when it depresses us.

I’m not suggesting that the solution to a widespread emotional health problem is simply to decide to be more positive. I acknowledge that a lot of our vulnerability is more psychological than logical. I can remember being a little kid and only just having learned to swim, and how I would be afraid to venture toward the deep end of the pool. Of course it’s no more dangerous over there; a person can drown in six inches of water. It just seemed more dangerous. As much as I reassured myself that the deep end was no big deal, the sight of that chasm opening up below me freaked me out every time. I finally got over this fear by simply closing my eyes when I got to the deep end. Without the visual stimulus, I could swim all the way across. The point is, “eyes wide open” doesn’t always reduce risk, and can introduce nonproductive anxiety.

Fast-forward a few years to when I’d moved on to bike racing. The Junior field (ages 16-17) in those days was pretty big—50 to 60 riders, typically—and fast. I remember the first road race of the season on a cold day with a strong crosswind, which meant lots of jostling around in the pack. I was feeling really intimidated, especially when I looked back at the large swarm of riders behind me, all of whom it seemed were saving their energy (in my draft) and could come flying past me at any moment. This was a major burden, psychologically, until I decided only to look at the riders ahead of me, and never allow myself to fall back very far. Each time I finished taking a turn at the front, I would only drop back a bit, and then get back into the line at fifth or sixth position. (To worm your way in, you look only forward, at the wheel you want to take.) This way, I was able to pretend I was already in a small breakaway with no swarming peloton to worry about. I did this for about fifty miles until I realized it was always the same riders ahead of me. Finally I sneaked a look back. The pack was gone—we’d dropped them! It wasn’t the size of the pack that mattered, but the quality of the riders near the front.

Far higher achievers than I have employed similar mind tricks. In this great interview, the cycling champion Andy Hampsten talks about the psychological rigor of beginning a pro career in Europe. So often, he was tempted to quit. He describes one such occasion, racing on a terribly cold, snowy spring day in Spain. He was shivering so badly he feared he might crash, and seriously considered abandoning. But then he found a way to deal with his fear: “a silly book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I thought of … where when the hero was in danger he had special glasses that would turn pitch black so he couldn’t see how dangerous things were. It’s best not to know … so I tried to apply that.” Instead of focusing on how frigid and dangerous this downhill was, he tried to look forward to the climb ahead, where he could warm up and the speed would be lower. His crisis of confidence hadn’t been driven by a fully reasoned assessment of the conditions; it was just negative self-talk. By choosing not to dwell on that negativity, Hampsten not only finished the race, finished the season, and made the transition to a world class professional, but grew his confidence and famously won the 1988 Giro d’Italia stage race by dominating a legendary mountain stage in a snowstorm.

Two circles

So, am I just suggesting we put our heads in the sand? That’s the whole trick, just ignore apparent threats? No, of course it’s more complicated than that. In his editorial, Brooks goes on to say, “People who provide therapy to depressive people try to break the cycle of catastrophic thinking so they can more calmly locate and deal with the problems they actually have control over” (italics mine). Societal catastrophes like climate change, systemic racism, and the vanishing middle class are all real problems, of course, but they have something in common: they are beyond the ability of most individuals to combat. They’re bigger than us, which is why we feel so powerless.

This brings me to a useful concept (which I’ve mentioned in these pages before, so bear with me if this is review): the distinction, as described in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, between the “circle of influence” and the “circle of concern.” Below is the author’s schematic. The idea is that we should spend most of our mental energy on what we can influence; for example, learning to manage our own stress. We should avoid spending too much energy on the circle of concern, such as the future of democracy, because that’s where most of us are largely helpless.

Did Hampsten’s team management emphasize to him how dangerous the race over the snow-covered Gavia Pass would be? Did they remind him that that no American had ever even finished on the podium of the Giro, which he now stood to do but only if he didn’t crash out in this dangerous stage? Did they show him a highlights reel of riders crashing on descents in bad weather? No, that would be pointless, and worse—and that would all be in the circle of concern. Instead, the team focused on what aspects of the race they could influence. They went around to all the sporting goods stores in the area and bought up all the cold weather gear they could find to equip their riders. They prepared Hampsten for success, and—since literally no other team had thought of this—in doing so they gave him an edge over his competition. (That stage of the Giro has become legendary; the tifosi (Italian fans) call it “the day the big men cried.”)

Why now?

Okay, so it’s best to separate what information is actionable, and what isn’t. But the Seven Habits book was published in 1989; if the matter is this simple, why is everyone’s emotional duress seeming to increase so much, and so fast, now? As reported by the National Institute of Mental Health, “more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (57.8 million in 2021).” If a growing sense of powerlessness can be linked to people spending more mental energy in the circle-of-concern space, what is causing that increase?

The Internet and social media are obviously implicated and I’m clearly not the first person to assert that. Even if we set people’s habits aside for the moment, the pace of bad news has accelerated, and it can feel like our reaction time has to be faster. Consider the meltdown of the Silicon Valley Bank: as described in this Charles Schwab article, “With the effects of rapid news flows, especially via social media, and banking that can be done quickly and via mobile devices, the bank’s collapse happened with lightning speed.” Much of the ripple effect across the economy has been due to sudden and unwarranted loss of confidence in the banking industry as a whole; as Schwab put it, “The main channel of contagion so far is more psychological than systemic.”

But where the mental health crisis is concerned, it’s not just the speed of the Internet at work; it’s how we choose to use it. Brooks cites a culture of denunciation. Sure, you can denounce others without the Internet but it’s a lot harder. I mean, unless you’re a professional whose work can get printed on paper, what are you going to do—pass out leaflets? Stand on a street corner braying? Collar your colleagues at the water cooler? No, when people are feeling fed up about vaccines, politics, or any other battle in the culture wars, they go post vitriolic comments beneath articles, or send tweets, or otherwise leverage the computer network that connects five billion people.

With all this bold negativity on display, it’s no wonder, as Brooks points out, so many people have developed extreme sensitivity to harm. In the parlance of the schoolyard bullying culture I grew up in, “they can dish it out but they can’t take it.” Well, maybe that’s not totally fair, but I think there’s something complicated going on around being a bully in one moment, and wanting to appear sensitive the next. The thickness of people’s skin, so to speak, is selective. For example, progressives criticize Jane Eyre because one of its protagonists participates (albeit “off screen”) in colonialism without the author denouncing him for it, so anybody who has experienced systematic oppression might find this triggering somehow. They say it’s best, therefore, to write the book off as “problematic” and not use it in schools. But then they go off and watch “Breaking Bad,” a show about a guy who cooks meth, or “Real Detective,” which repeatedly shows graphic footage of a young woman’s naked corpse. If challenged on whether this could possibly be healthy to take in, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s just, you know, edgy.”

I have a scheme to help you navigate these waters and fight the tide of these increasingly anxious times. But before I begin: what follows isn’t for everybody. If you feel a strong need to grow your knowledge of the precise cause and extent of the world’s problems, and feel that proper virtue signaling can’t be achieved without sharing what you’ve learned, and that your personal identity depends on upholding a culture of personal punditry, you should just stop now. Go read something else.

What? You are still with me? You want to continue? Great! Let’s get started.

Opt out of the culture war

The first thing I’d like to establish is that in the culture war that’s raging, we should all be conscientious objectors. Why? Because this is a war that can’t be won. Our strong opinions are being weaponized, but we aren’t actual soldiers and we’re not being deployed with any battlefield tactic that can actually prevail over a known enemy. Political extremists and Internet algorithms are drawing out our built-in impulse to find someone to blame for the world’s problems, just to foment our opposition and thereby increase our loyalty. (The “blame instinct” is another of the ten reasons Rosling cites for people misunderstanding the world.) Unless we’re politicians or policymakers, we aren’t changing the world when we rail against it; we’re just collateral damage in a war that will never end.

I’m not saying we have no role in the world’s problems. Of course if we’re concerned about climate change we should try to walk, bike, take mass transit, etc., and vote for programs that address the problem. And those of us who are parents have a duty to educate our children and help them become responsible adults. But when somebody who isn’t a parent and hasn’t been a student in forty years wants to collar me and go on a tirade about the “crap” that “they” are teaching in “our” schools, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to run for the hills.

Take ownership of your attention

If a chain smoker complained to you that he was chronically short of breath, or a fast food junkie groused about how hard it is to lose weight, you’d probably be biting your tongue. Where our physical health is concerned, it’s easy to tie the willing consumption of a dangerous substance to the natural consequences it produces. Some of us are outspoken about this; consider the age-old cliché, “My body is a temple.” Fair enough, but what about our minds? We’re less likely to question the growing tendency we have to be glued to our screens, scrolling through our feeds. I do hear people confessing that they probably waste too much time on social media, but this is given with the half-serious, hangdog air of somebody acknowledging something fairly harmless, like a caffeine addiction. Nobody treats overconsumption of polemic Internet content as a big problem. But I believe this content is a pollutant, and possibly as dangerous to our mental health as tobacco or junk food are to our physical health.

I think it’d be easier to get people to agree with this concept if I took the partisan angle and said either that Fox News is toxic to the brain, or that NPR is, depending on my audience. But it isn’t so much the position itself that’s the issue; as Brooks, and the Seven Habits book, point out, the despair comes from railing against what we can’t solve (and guess what: blaming one party or another doesn’t actually help). So when we use platforms that track our interests, and that have learned how to push our buttons, we’re signing up for a steady diet of emotional unease. What’s needed is the wisdom to understand the threat here, and the discipline to shelter our minds from constant provocation. It’s realizing we can choose whether or not to peer into the chasm at the deep end of the pool.

Firewall for the Mind

In the realm of computer networks, a firewall is a device (or software function) that enforces rules about what communication, or “traffic,” is permitted. It filters out threats based on where content is coming from, what type it is, and so forth. Early firewalls had an access control list with simple rules like “allow [or deny] any traffic from [source] to [destination].” Modern ones are very sophisticated; for example, the one governing my home WiFi blocks all gaming, social media, and pornography, as well as any traffic from China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, or Syria.

I’m not suggesting you focus on creating a technical impediment to this or that Internet content. A firewall for the mind isn’t something you’d configure on any device, but rather a more general rule base you create and adhere to around how you’re going to use your brain and what you’re willing to focus it on. It’s about what information, news, entertainment, etc. you’re going to allow in, what you’re going to ration, and what you’re going to reject, whether it’s online, printed, broadcast, or spoken. I propose that instead of passively receiving what’s pushed toward us, we should each start with a general rule—“deny all”—and then make specific exceptions based on what will educate, entertain, or enlighten us without any side effects like frustration, existential angst, anxiety, or a feeling of doom and gloom. This should be highly personalized—never mind what everyone around you is focusing on. After all, that’s not working out so well lately.

As an adult I’ve never had cable TV; I was a late adopter of cell phones and smartphones; I eschew all social media. I also refuse to talk about politics with just about anybody. Those are aspects of my personal firewall, and my rule base has adapted according to what’s going on in my life. For example, when my wife was pregnant, I blacklisted the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which is a terrorist tract designed to terrify new parents. As I headed in to my third decade in corporate America I stopped looking at “Dilbert” because it was just too cynical. In the years following the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, with political polarization at a fever pitch, I stopped reading the political articles in The New Yorker precisely because they took me deep into circle-of-concern territory where, like all kinds of people across the political spectrum, I felt aggrieved but helpless.

Of course your own rule base can be whatever you decide, but you might start with a few general questions:

• Is this content making me happy?
• Is it making me money?
• Is it making me laugh?
• Is it edifying or entertaining?
• Is it satisfying my curiosity?
• If it concerns a problem or an issue, is there some specific action I can take that will actually help?
• Does this content dwell on bad news that occupies only my circle of concern?

Existing mental firewalls

It would be naïve for me to pretend this concept is entirely new, and in fact people have been building their own mental firewalls since the dawn of human existence. The problem is, the rules are often set up not around protecting our brains from sadness and anxiety, but around tuning out what doesn’t match up with our tastes and/or belief systems. Choosing between Fox News and NPR is part of a rule base, after all. Where things are going particularly awry is that cable TV programming, much modern print journalism, and in particular the myriad content providers on the Internet are tailoring their product to us. This seems like a favor except that the end goal is always to maximize our outrage and hang on to our attention for as long as possible. The circle of concern is their happy stomping ground—not yours. Good mental firewalls thwart these mechanisms.

In general, I go after content that primarily exists to entertain or enlighten me, not persuade me. Most fiction, for example, is free of any specific agenda (and when a work’s social conscience seems too prominent, to the point it’s just depressing, I reserve the right to withdraw). Where nonfiction is concerned I particularly enjoy topics that aren’t in the news, and which nobody is bickering about, such as (to cite a convenient example) this article on caterpillars in which I encountered all kinds of delightful, non-pressing information. For example, the “caterpillar of the silver-spotted skipper … uses an air-gun-like appendage in its anus to send its [feces] pellets soaring. This practice, known as ‘fecal firing,’ discombobulates parasitic wasps.” Stuff like this argues for a more nuanced model of attention involving a Circle of Delight.

This isn’t to say the caterpillar article was all rosy; it did explain how scientists are now seeing significant declines in insect diversity and population that could become an ecological crisis, based on how many plants depend on insects for pollination. So did I start combing the Internet for more information on this problem? Did I try to make it part of my feed? No. I don’t have a feed, I’m not a scientist, and this simply isn’t my problem to solve. That’s the kind of line that I have to draw … which I think you should draw, too.

[Speaking of drawing, the art at the top of this post is by my younger daughter.]

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