How concern triumphs over worry?
The level of suffering due to worry have never been greater in our world, that is not to say there are more things to worry about which has only ever limited by the human imagination. What has changed is the availability of opportunities to worry. In the ancient times (pre-Internet and connectivity) we would receive news twice a day, with the newspapers in the morning and precisely at 6 o'clock with the evening news where you would have a choice between the television and radio news. Now it is available at the touch of a button, always waiting for you when you wake up, we can slide open our phone and be horrified by the world before we have even had our first glass of water in the morning. It can notify us at the time of it's choosing rather than ours, it accompanies our social media and Google searches, it hunts us and that is if we are even trying to avoid.
Worry, anger and fear sells, it makes money and commodify our attention, as a rule of thumb, when something is free it means you are the product especially your worry, as fear is the advertiser's friend. The fear of missing out, not being as good as the airbrushed model is, not protecting what is important to you and even the risk that you will be seen as a social misfit for not having the latest pair of sunglasses. These are powerful drivers of our actions, and they are a skillful way to manipulate us as we are far more motivated to avoid negatives then we are to desire positives. We would always prefer to keep the jam sandwich that we have got rather than risk it for the chance of gaining truffles and champagne, even when we are not particularly hungry, we value the avoidance of loss so highly because in a hunter gatherer society loss was a killer but not gaining a marginal benefit did not kill you.
This primitive urge made sense once, but in the modern world it makes more sense to optimise for happiness rather than focusing all your energy on avoiding catastrophic events. Whilst we have to recognise and work with our primal motivations, that does not mean we have to be at their mercy, we can choose a different view and, even rationalise and habitualise them it to the point that the mind accept it as reality. Instead of avoiding worry or being resentful of the prompts and notifications that make you worry, use them as reminders to change your worry to concern.
And why would we do that? Concern is useful, it focuses our attention on a problem, and there are plenty of problems in the world both generally and for ourselves. The way they are presented to you is designed to engage your fear and operating from a place of fear never generates the best actions only defensive ones at best, at worse it can trigger our fight, flight, freeze response, as you cannot fight or run away from the news that only really leaves being frozen with worry or anger. Concern is a more optimistic response and requires that you operate from your fortress of love, and you need the optimism to think that your actions will make at least a marginal difference. You have to believe that you can affect change, that you are able to influence your environment and society, that your action have the plausible possibility of being effective and meaningful. Action that aligns with our values feels good and satisfies our concern, and the more effective those actions are, the more we are satisfied.
This may be difficult to believe, so many people have a narrative of being utterly powerless and therefore what is the point in doing anything, I cannot change this and that only leaves anger. If we could leave it alone at this point it would be a problem, however our fear of loss aversion, does not go away by ignoring it. The most effective way to deal with it is to take effective action even if it has a minimal effect. Our minds prompt us by worry to act and it is only satisfies when you have done so in an effective way. So the action has to have an effective narrative that accompanies it.
The first task in creating that narrative is to recognise that we are a problem-solving species and we have the most impressive track record of doing so over the last five thousands years. Our closest rivals are quite literally great apes, we are not just a little bit better than apes we are exponentially better both at individual level and as a society as a whole. Some people would point out that the monkeys never had a dark age, that we can lose the gains we have acquired, but that would be to miss the fact that monkey society has never really progressed in the first place, and that the dark ages was a problem that we overcame.
We have solved problem after problem, tribal warfare, honour killings, autocracy, witch burning, slavery, drought, famine, disease and short life expectancy, to name but a few. Have we solved every problem, certainly not, we solve one problem at a time, often ones that arise because of a earlier solution. Agricultural improvements led to the problem of being limited by horses, coal gave us more horsepower without the costs, oil solved the deathly coal smog of Victorian Britain, gas gave us clean air and in time solar and wind (or something even cooler) will de-carbonise our economies.
There is a line of innovation that over time has reduced the externalities that affect us all, it is just difficult to see it at any particular moment in time when all your thoughts are about problems caused not the ones that have already been solved, by changing our focus to the history of our successes, we are able to operate from a place of optimism that change is possible, and in the long run almost certain. Technology makes extraordinary leaps all the time, which almost immediately becomes the new ordinary and commonplace, just look at cellphones and how in any street in the world even with the worse poverty, people will be staring down at their phone and probably moaning about their signal.
That does not mean that we are personally going to solve the problem, however having concern does mean that we are motivated to be part of the solution. Any problem is solvable by changes in our behaviour and technology, we might not be scientists but every single one of us is responsible for our behaviour. So use your concern to take effective action, change your behaviour to being part of the solution, if you are concerned about the environment, personally consume less, buy less clothes or second-hand ones, fly less, learn to value quality rather than convenience.
Your concern might drive you towards supporting charities with time or money, to sign petitions, join political parties, attend rallies, be an early adopter of weird technology, it is entirely up to you how much effort you want to put into solving the problem. However what is guaranteed is that worry will never solve it, you can be worried all day long and never take a single effective action towards solving it. What does is direct, persistent concern, concern gets stuff done, it motivates you to spend lazy afternoons thinking about how to solve the problems that affects us all, so if you see someone sat in an armchair, staring out the window with mild concern, remember they might just be saving the world, despite appearances to the contrary. How you express your concern is up to you, but try not to worry about it, instead take that action which changes it in to concern.
