We're Better Off When Things Feel Terrible

A lesson in paradox.

Grandfailure

In Alan Moore's 1986 graphic novel Watchmen, a retired superhero named Ozymandias genetically engineers a giant alien squid and then teleports it to New York, where it kills 3 million people in a single day. The attack shocks the world into peace, ending the Cold War.

There's a weird logic to what Ozymandias does.

In order to reverse the planet's slow descent into a nuclear apocalypse, he has to trick them into thinking there's a far bigger threat. Even that's not enough. This fake threat has to cause so much death and destruction so fast that it looks and feels worse than nuclear armageddon, which would kill far more than 3 million people but which everyone in the 1980s seemed to tolerate as a daily risk.

Maybe you find yourself reminiscing over the early days of 2020, despite the accusations that it makes you sound mentally ill or sadistic. Maybe you've been accused of wishing for things to get worse. Maybe sometimes you secretly pray for the equivalent of a giant squid attack to shock a little bit of sense into everyone. Maybe it makes you feel a little guilty, but you're not wrong.

Maybe you’re even sitting here now, wondering if a giant alien squid massacre would do enough to wake everyone up.

There's a reason.

Intuitively, you've landed on something that psychologists and life coaches have been studying for decades, something Alan Moore knew even decades earlier than that. You've seen how everyone acts when things get incredibly bad incredibly fast. They actually do what's right. They pull together. They listen to truth and science.

It's called the region-beta paradox.

The region-beta paradox explains why the public responds better than expected during immediate emergencies and disasters, but they do worse during prolonged threats like pandemics or climate change.

A team of psychologists led by Daniel Gilbert at Harvard introduced this term about 20 years ago. As he puts it, people "mistakenly expect more intense states to last longer than less intense states." They confuse their emotional reaction to a given situation with the actual threat it presents. The worse something gets, the more it motivates everyone to change. They do a better job of moderating their behavior, and they often avoid the worst possible outcome.

For a crisis to motivate everyone to action, it has to hit a threshold. It has to get bad enough fast enough for everyone to notice and connect the dots. If things get bad too slow, then the crisis fails to cross the required threshold. It doesn't send off the alarm bells in everyone's mind.

They don't prepare.

They relax.

A large portion of society is willing to tolerate bad situations on a personal and even global scale because they think they won't last as long, or that they'll go away on their own. This infuriating logic trap might sound familiar to those of us who keep watching the world go to hell at a steady, almost predictable rate.

The world doesn't seem to mind slow armageddon.

They even prefer it.

This paradox leads the average person to make all kinds of terrible decisions. Studies have found that drivers are less likely to wear seat belts if they're taking "just a short trip," because they confuse their risk of an accident with the length of their drive. Their risk of an accident goes up when they feel safe and let their guard down. We're more likely to cancel minor surgeries than major ones, even if they're just as important. Studies have also found that people will stay with partners who insult them but avoid strangers who make the same insults.

The region-beta paradox explains a lot about what's going on right now. We can add it to our list of psychological hangups that keep us from dealing with our greatest challenges and most immediate threats.

It's easier to indulge all of your cognitive biases when things are getting bad slowly. We're easier to control and manipulate.

A fast disaster demands action.

We're like Ozymandias, almost wishing things would get bad faster, not because we enjoy death and suffering, but because we know it's the only sure way to get everyone to do the right thing.

A gradual descent into fascism goes unnoticed by most, because it's easier to deny, downplay, dismiss, defend, and ultimately easier to swallow than a fast descent into fascism. So most people accept it.

Four years ago, the public was willing to protect each other. They accepted slight inconveniences. They wanted to work less and live more. They wanted to spend more time with their families. They wanted to consume less and lead a more sustainable life. They wanted to protect the vulnerable instead of exiling and sacrificing them for political expedience. There were all kinds of articles, podcasts, and books calling on us to rethink our toxic norms. Despite the looming threat to our lives, there was a genuine push for a better future. We were all in this together.

Now, that's gone.

When things are going okay on the surface, everyone lapses into complacency. Suddenly, attitudes and behaviors they once rejected become acceptable. They do things they once considered cruel and unthinkable.

It doesn't bother them.

At this point, it would take more than a giant alien squid to get everyone to do the right thing. Nobody's seriously suggesting we make things worse on purpose. Most of us want to live in a world where everyone just does the right thing period, but if you find yourself identifying with Ozymandias more than usual, understand that it doesn't make you a bad person. You're just noticing the region-beta paradox. If something bad is going to happen, it's better for it to happen fast.

We're better off when things are terrible.

Weird, isn't it?