Here's a simple solution to the pessimism culture. Read a book.

If you want to break the doom loop, take the Jane Austen cure.

Look around. People are dissatisfied. There are riots and lawlessness, an epidemic of poor mental health, and a trend for electing divisive politicians. Despite tremendous advances in technology and living standards, there is widespread nostalgia for the 1990s and 2000s.

According to the 2024 World Happiness Report, happiness fell significantly between 2006 and 2023 in countries like the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and by twice as much for the young. This is a common finding: “Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Spain are countries where the old are now significantly happier than the young.” Though there is a complicated picture across the world with happiness levels rising and falling in different places, the report says that “Negative emotions are more frequent now than in 2006-2010 everywhere except in East Asia and in Europe.” In Western Europe, life evaluations among the young are significantly lower than they were in 2006-2010.

Many solutions and diagnoses have been offered. Words like omnicrisis and polycrisis have been proposed. Research suggests that the more heavily engaged with causes to do with environmental problems you are, the worse your mental health is likely to be. But none of this is well understood: we live in fractious unhappy times with little coherent explanation and no apparent cure. Despite the fact that we are rich and free, we keep bickering. What the poet Richard Hugo once wrote about old rust belt towns feels increasingly true of much of modern society: “The principal supporting business now is rage.”

In the Atlantic recently, Derek Thompson proposed that this is a very Western phenomenon, largely confined to the Anglosphere. In non-English speaking countries, people are less pessimistic. “The TikTok hashtag #Trauma has more than 6 billion views. According to the podcast search engine Listen Notes, more than 5,500 podcasts have the word trauma in their title. In celebrity media, mental-health testimonials are so common that they’ve spawned a subgenre of summaries of celebrity mental-health testimonials”. Significantly, American news coverage has become significantly more negative since the 1970s, tipping over to being predominantly negative since 2019.

And that is the same period of time during which rates of people reading books have been in steep decline. It’s not the whole solution, and it’s a speculative idea, but I want to suggest that many people will feel better if they move away from ideological politics, turn off the television, put down their phone, and read a good book. If you want to break the doom loop, take the Jane Austen cure.

According to the Pew Centre, back in the 1970s, when news coverage wasn’t so pessimistic, only 8% of Americans reported not having read a book in the last year. That figure now stands at 23%. A new survey from the Reading Agency shows that only 50% of UK adults are regular readers. 35% are “lapsed”. And 15% have never been regular readers. In 2015, 58% of adults were regular readers. And only 8% of adults were non-readers back then. The figures for the 16-24 bracket suggest these figures will continue to decline.

Many reasons are given for this decline: distraction of social media, lack of ability to focus, and feeling bored or uninterested by the reading material. Those who did read reported better mental health, improved sleep and concentration, and better understanding of other people’s feelings. Readers have better life satisfaction. 

The reason, I think, is that reading is a solitary activity. Reading requires us to leave the world of arguments, ideologies, news coverage, and TikTok feeds and to exist inside our imaginations for a while. Many solutions are sought to the wide-spread mood of dissatisfaction, not least the prevalence of therapy. But this keeps us focussed on what is making us miserable: our own lives, our own problems, the people around us.

And misery is contagious. People are imitative. This copying is how children learn from adults; it is how art represents life; it is how we manage to cooperate socially; it is why we have fashions. Similarly, as negative feelings emerge in society they then spread via imitation. That’s what Derek Thompson means about the role of gloomy news media and trauma TikTok.

According to the French literary critic René Girard, a theorist of this sort of imitation, which he called mimesis, we become rivalrous when we imitate people who we want to become. Soon the rivalry spirals into enmity. Do we want the product advertised by the celebrity, or do we dream of being the celebrity? When we realise we cannot be that person, have their life—when the imitative rivalry becomes too intense—a scapegoat is needed to restore harmony.

The more obsessed we become with being someone else (and thus the more obsessed we are with our own deficiencies), the more we are likely to be angry with the world, to be rivalrous rather than harmonious. And these feelings are infectious. As Girard scholar Cynthia L. Haven said, “the enmity itself is the contagion, spreading until the whole community is in mimetic meltdown.”

As we look around our disaffected and disordered world, we will see a lot of truth in what Girard says. As bad moods have spread throughout the West, we have relied on methods of cancelling people to resolve our differences. 

Girard’s solution to this imitative rivalry was religion: the repression and diversion of mimetic forces through rules, rituals, and prohibitions. But Girard had to acknowledge that priests and philosophers had lost their place in the modern world. In to the vacuum came experts and self-help gurus. Inevitably, this is inadequate. What could be more conformist—more imitative—than taking advice from a famous self-help guru?

Instead, when Girard was asked about overcoming mimesis, he said “We might begin with personal sanctity.” To break free of mimesis, we must cultivate our imaginations and expand the richness of our inner lives. At the exactly the moment when we most need to sit quietly with a good book, in other words, we are too often depriving ourselves of that restorative solitude.

We will not think or argue our way out of modern culture’s pessimism. We will have to imagine our way out. We live, as Robert Graves said, in a web of language. The bigger our web, the bigger our world. In the philosopher Richard Rorty’s words (paraphrasing Percy Shelley), imagination sets the bounds of thought: imagination breaks the path that reason follows. To insist on yourself, you must discover yourself through the acquisition of new language and new ideas. The bigger your imagination, the bigger your world. And the easier it will be to avoid the pessimistic contagion.

Unlike the world of trauma and therapy and politics and television, the imagination is not a place of ideology. Instead, it works with what the Romantic poet John Keats called “negative capability”. This is when we hold different ideas in our mind at once, without picking between them. That’s why in the nineteenth century, the literary critic Walter Pater said that the “spirit of art” was where “opposites cease”. (He was talking about aesthetic ideas, but his point generalises.)

Great art does moralise. It often is about politics. Or the battle of good and evil. But life keeps breaking in. As we read, we are confronted with a range of characters, ideas, plot twists. We do not stop and argue. We experience. We think.

That is why we must now turn to our imaginations. We aren’t going to change our culture with more television and more news, with more TikTok or more politics. We need more of the feeling that the professor Helen Gardner described when she read Dickens. It was, she said, like being “invaded by a sudden sense of glory” when Dickens made her laugh. Who feels like that watching a political speech or reading an op-ed? What sudden sense of glory accompanies the watching of Mad Men or TikTok?

So turn off Netflix. Put down your phone. Ignore politics for a while. Quiet the negative contagion. Read a good book. You’ll feel better.

As the former Merton Professor of Literature, John Carey, said, “Reading releases you from the limits of yourself. Reading is freedom.”