Morgan Housel

They all figured it out.

And it's just been in the last five years, I think, that the social media algorithms figured it out too.

And you see this at the economy level with like levels of consumer confidence are the lowest they've ever been ever right now.

lower than they were during the 2008 crisis, lower than they were in the darkest days of COVID.

Consumers have never felt worse about the economy in the history that we've been tracking this stuff than right now.

Of course, there's a lot going on right now, but it's not even political.

It spans different presidencies.

It's been spanning for a while.

And I think at least an element of that

is that people, particularly young people, are more exposed to pessimism than they've ever been at all.

There's some interesting studies about tracking New York Times headlines over the decades.

And even as the world has gotten objectively better in terms of life expectancy and average income and whatnot, the headlines progressively get more negative over time.

And that's been going on over decades.

And in a media world where you're just trying to get attention, you just need everyone's attention, very different from like the Walter Cronkite days of you had a monopoly on people's attention.

Now when there's an arms race for attention and you're never gonna get there faster by being pessimistic, it's like you can live in a world in which things are objectively, analytically getting better and people feel worse and worse about it.

So I think that's always been true, but the last five years it went steep.

I think there's plenty that rhymes with things that have happened in the past.

Every 20 or 30 years, there's a new technology that at least promises to fundamentally change everything, and usually does.

The Industrial Revolution, radio in the 1920s, nuclear energy in the 1950s, the internet in the 1990s, a new technology that says, this is going to rewrite everything that we know, and your jobs, your careers are not going to be the same in a short period of time, five or 10 years.

That's been going on forever.