We're losing perspective on the true state of the world and fear is impeding our ability to make decisions and effect positive change.

That's the view of Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist who argues that we — both as individuals and societies — are ignoring statistical evidence that the world "is getting better, not worse".

"The reality is that many indicators have improved," he tells RN's Future Tense.

"Not all of them and not everywhere, but many of them are much more positive than people realise."

These include a dramatic fall in infant mortality, a significant rise in life-expectancy, a decline in homicide across many parts of the world, increasing literacy levels, a drop in the number of deaths in war, and a massive reduction over the last half-century in the number of people living in extreme poverty.

The end is not nigh!

According to Professor Pinker, our media culture shoulders much of the blame.

He believes it's biased toward the negative because bad news is seen as being "more morally serious".

"It's a misconception coming from the rather warped idea that the only serious journalism, and the only serious intellectual commentary, is one that points to what can go wrong and with forebodings of doom," he says.

"There is a market for attention and for gravitas and for seriousness, and any kind of report of a positive seems like some kind of scheme, some kind of attempt to sell you something."

Others go further, saying pessimism is now entrenched in the Western world, leading to a pervading sense of cultural decline.

Pessimism has become part of the "modern human condition", argues Carter Phipps from the Institute for Cultural Evolution, a US-based not-for-profit organisation.

He says it's stripping people of both their focus and resilience.

"I have friends who say 'maybe it's all over for the human condition, it's all over, we have to mourn the Earth, that's the main job now'," Mr Phipps says.

"Really? Has it gotten that bad? I don't think we're at that point at all.

"If we look out at the world — I don't think that's what [the data] is telling us at all, but that's where some people are at."

Pessimism steers us toward unhealthy politics

Mr Phipps says when people lose a sense that the future will be better than the past, it leads to feelings of disempowerment and absolutism; the view that society is broken rather than simply facing challenges and difficulties.

"Then we start reaching for populist leaders or messianic ideas," he says.

"We start reaching for things that are unhealthy, about how maybe we need to overturn the table completely and start over.

"The way I put it, we start reaching for revolution instead of evolution, and what we really need is to continue this evolutionary process.

"We have real problems, we need to face those and continue to develop, but we don't need to overturn everything to do it."

Revolutions begin when people believe society is broken rather than facing challenges, experts say. ( Getty: Corbis )

Professor Pinker agrees.

"Some of the support for radical populist movements, and radical Marxist movements on the other end of the spectrum, come from the feeling that things couldn't be worse. That all our institutions are failing, we should just bulldoze them in the hope that anything that rises out of the rubble is bound to be better than what we have now," he says.

"And we know from societies that have undergone radical changes that that's a very dangerous attitude."

There's also the danger that pessimism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, says Art Markman, executive director of the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

"You really want to approach the future with a certain degree of hope," he says.

"There's a bumper sticker that says something like 'Whether you believe you can or you can't, you're right'.

"To the extent that you believe that there isn't much that you can do to improve the future, you're not going to put in the effort to try to make the future better than it could be."

But are humans hardwired for pessimism?

Queensland University psychologist Roy Baumeister argues there is a straight-forward evolutionary explanation for our pessimism.

"I think it's natural that the human mind orients automatically toward the negative," he says.

"Psychologically, wherever we can equate good things and bad things, the bad things have stronger impact.

"Avoiding disaster was the first job and that's one thing that our minds and our ability to project into the future evolved for.

"To reduce it to simple terms: 'death only has to win once, life has to win every day'."

Mr Phipps talks about what he calls the "spell of solidity", where people instinctively make judgments about the future based on fixed assumptions about the present and the past.

Such judgments may seem logical, he says, but can fail to predict the impact of unexpected disruptive events or technologies.

The rose-coloured past that never was

Experts say we often subconsciously embellish the past. ( Getty: fStop/Caspar Benson )

But what makes future doom-saying especially corrosive, say experts, is when its linked to a romanticised past.

That emotive combination can accelerate a sense of despair and disillusionment.

Such nostalgia can also be factually incorrect, with research suggesting that our individual and collective memories of the past are sometimes unreliable or highly inaccurate.

Psychologists have concluded we often subconsciously embellish the past in order to deal with present uncertainties or painful experiences.

The Blitz, for instance, is often remembered as a time of good spirits, when Londoners dutifully pulled together in a spirit of dogged, almost cheerful, solidarity and defiance.

In the aftermath of a German bombing raid, this milkman decided to continue delivering milk in London. ( Getty: Fred Morley )

But historical studies tell a very different story.

Washington University professor Henry Roediger, a specialist in collective memory, says the human tendency to put a rosy tint on past events becomes especially prevalent where those past events eventually had a good ending.

Our rewriting of the stresses experienced in war-time London, he says, fits into this category, as does the experience of many women in childbirth.

"It's terribly painful, but even a day afterwards they say it was certainly worth it, the pain wasn't so bad," he says.

"So, we have individual memories that are often somewhat better than the actual events that occurred, and we have collective memories of that too."

A lesson from the ancients

Our difficulties with understanding the lessons of the past and keeping a balanced perspective on future fears date back millennia, says historian Charles Edel, co-author of Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order.

He argues the greatness of Ancient Athens was built in large part on that society's success to keep future-focused while simultaneously using history to remain vigilant.

Historian Charles Edel says Ancient Greeks kept a balanced perspective on the future. ( Getty: Aris Messinis )

The Athenians did this, he says, by institutionalising a sense of potential "tragedy" into their forward thinking.

"It was a Greek conceit that only by thinking about tragedy constantly, by keeping counsel with your worst fears, could you possibly hope to avert a real-life tragedy by prompting the type of conversations you needed to have as a community to stave off what might inevitably lead to disaster," he says.

Dr Edel says that beneficial sense of tragedy has now been lost, but was revived several times across the centuries, usually after periods of great international conflict.

The last occasion it guided global political thinking, he argues, was in the aftermath of WWII and led to the establishment of the current system of international rules and treaties.

Crucially, that original "tragic sensibility", he says, never bled into the sort of pessimism or melancholy we experience today.

The power of comparison — and its pitfalls

To stay positive about the future, it's important to cultivate a personal sense of agency. ( Getty: Wakila )

Dr Markman identifies several reasons why we so often perceive the past through rose-coloured glasses.

The first, he says, is that we cherry-pick from history.

We remember select events from the past but forget about the day-to-day worries of the time.

"You know how the story came out, and so all of those concerns about how it was going to work out are no longer in issue because you can pick out the storyline," he explains.

"And so, it's much easier to understand your life story when you look back on it than it is to project it in a forward direction."

Professor Markman also warns against the dangers of making "upward social comparisons".

"If you look at social media there's always someone out there who's got something more than you've got. And it's easy to look at those things and feel dissatisfied with what you don't have rather than satisfied with what you do," he says.

"I think the best social comparisons you can make are to compare your past self to your present self and to really look at how far you've come in various dimensions.

"To remind yourself that every day of your life had some joy in it but it also had some things that were annoying."

And to ensure our thoughts of the future don't fall into debilitating pessimism, Professor Markman says it's important to cultivate a personal sense of agency.

"A sense that we can actually affect the future with our actions as individuals and also collectively," he explains.

"If there are problems in the world, let's get together with people and actually try to build a plan to solve them.

"The best way to feel satisfied with life is to feel like you are part of a community that is trying to achieve a goal, and that's something that can actually make the present a deeply wonderful place to be."