I remember every case I’ve ever seen that unexpectedly went south — every single one. And my memory is awful. Examples of things I can’t remember are the names of countless wonderful clients, what I had for lunch yesterday and all the cases that unexpectedly went great.
I know I’m not the only one in veterinary medicine who looks at a case and immediately recalls everything I’ve seen, heard and read about how presentations like it can end catastrophically. As you can imagine, this strange superpower is far from limited to a focus on clinical medicine.
When we think about the state of our profession (and society at large), we naturally tend to focus on the pain points. Psychologists call this “negativity bias,” a cognitive bias that refers to our tendency to pay more attention to, and give more weight to, negative information or stimuli than positive.
In veterinary medicine, negativity bias leads us to spend much more time reflecting on worrisome aspects of our profession, like mental health, burnout and staff shortages, than on the smiles and successes we encounter daily. When we consider the future, the natural response for most of us is anxiety. We worry about the impact of advancements in telehealth, artificial intelligence, private equity, corporatization and online retail much more than we consider the benefits these forces might bring.
Cynicism as Wisdom
I remember yelling at a man at a veterinary conference one time.
Let me pause here and assure you I don’t normally yell at people. It’s wildly out of character for me. I generally see behaviors like it as a disappointing loss of emotional control. Given that getting angry seldom improves a situation, it’s a bad strategy regardless of your objectives. I can count on one hand the number of people I yelled at in my life and still have fingers left over.
But there I was. Hands shaking and face red. “You’re wrong!” is all I remember verbalizing.
I was in my first year in veterinary practice, and I radiated into the world enthusiasm for our profession and its future. I believed the future was bright for veterinarians and that veterinary medicine could give those who pursued it autonomy, purpose and financial security. Yeah, it’s hard work, but I thought we should be grateful to be a part of the profession.
I suspect the gentleman I met that evening thought he was doing me a favor. I think he saw my optimism as naïve and wanted to share with me how the world actually works. After we were introduced and I shared a bit of my excitement about my first year of practice and the future, he leaned in conspiratorially.
“You know, there’s about to be way too many veterinarians,” he said. “The schools are way overproducing.”
He told me salaries would tank and student debt loads would soar. He said big-box stores would corner the market for veterinary medicine and that we’d all end up working for companies like Walmart. We would be doing medicine out of a cookbook, and, oh yeah, our profession was “too female” to be financially successful.
That’s when I yelled at him. None of what he said was true. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now.
So why did he say that stuff? Some people think being cynical is being wise. Think about it. From food critics to fashion designers to political commentators, how many people have you seen crap on ideas and efforts in an attempt to look insightful?
Listen, we’ve all seen bad things happen. And because of negativity bias, we all tend to put a lot of weight and thought into setbacks. Some think they do a service by introducing pessimism or cynicism into a positive conversation. If someone is excited about something and I let her know it will never work and won’t matter that much even if it does, I’m saving her the pain of disappointment later on. Right?
That’s what the guy at the conference must have thought as he tried to pop my happy little balloon.
The Black Empire
Bad news spreads faster and gets more attention than good news. Negativity bias explains a lot of it. We’re wired to pay more attention to scary things than things that make us happy. When you think of the world our caveman ancestors lived in, that makes a lot of sense.
A 2022 study found that the “proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness” in the United States got markedly worse from 2000 to 2019. Our behaviors on social media drive part of that. From 2016 to 2019, Facebook gave “anger” emoji reactions to posts five times more weight than “like” reactions when deciding which posts to show other users. The practice arose because Facebook’s machine-learning algorithms found that posts angering people fueled more engagement than posts pleasing them.
We developed a word for scrolling social media and looking at the headlines and happenings: doomscrolling. If you aren’t familiar with that particular activity, congratulations! You haven’t been on social media in the past few decades and are probably slightly happier and more stable than the rest of us.
The doom and gloom slant isn’t confined to social media, however. What works to get engagement online also works in the rest of the world. Outrage, cynicism and fear perform just as well on cable news, radio and podcasts as on social media. And here’s the thing: They also perform well in conversation.
At some level, we all know how to get attention when we want it, and it rarely involves saying something positive. Often, we choose to bond over complaints, fears and hardship. We laugh with knowing smiles about how the wheels will fall off, the plan will fail, things will get worse, or people will be stupid.
Today, doom culture seems to be everywhere. Cynicism and pessimism have always existed, but the volume today and a healthy dose of “none of this matters” nihilism are at an all-time high.
Is Positivity the Answer?
I’m sure it seems obvious at this point that I’m going to say we need to be relentlessly positive. Well, no.
Sure, I think a more positive outlook would do most of us some good. However, our profession has its challenges, and society’s struggles are real. Ceaselessly pointing out what is good while ignoring the bad parts doesn’t help us improve our world. It can make people who are struggling feel invisible and unimportant. That’s not what any of us want, so let’s set the toxic positivity aside and get down to business.
The Rebellion
In July 2017, Alexandra Rowland, a Massachusetts writer, posted the following on Tumblr: “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk, pass it on.”
Grimdark is a fiction genre characterized by bleak subject matter and a dystopian environment. The discourse around veterinary medicine often feels way too “grimdark” for my tastes, and I’ve had enough of it.
It’s time for us to push back against the idea that everything is terrible and getting worse. Let’s reject the implication that tomorrow will be less enjoyable than today, we’ll be more exhausted, and any changes will be for the worse. Let’s tear down the belief that to be wise means to be cynical and to be funny means to be sarcastic. Most of all, let’s flip off the idea that none of this matters anyway. It definitely matters to the people we impact.
Let’s rebel.
Like a highly educated and compassionate punk rock band, let’s stick our tongues out at mainstream doom culture. No, we’re not going to do it by battling negativity with more negativity or by hammering people with baseless positivity that doesn’t reflect how things actually are. Instead, we’re going to revolt by refusing to extinguish our hope and optimism for the future. That’s the Hopepunk rebellion.
Why don’t you join us? It doesn’t matter if others want to participate. We don’t need everyone on board. We can each be Hopepunk in our own way.
Let’s stare down the hardships of practice with leather-and-chain optimism and strike matches of hope when things around us look dark. Instead of rocking mohawks, we can jump in and help make peoples’ days better. Instead of sporting face tattoos, we’ll remind colleagues leaving our practice of all the good they did today and of the positive impact they’ll make on the world tomorrow.
That’s the rebellion I want. Want to join up? Maybe we can even make T-shirts.
MIXED EMOTIONS
A 2022 PLOS One study concluded, “We hope that future research throws light on the potential psychological and social impact of public consumption of news media diets with increasingly negative sentiment and anger/fear/sadness undertones embedded within them.” Learn more at bit.ly/3XplZ5R.