Why are college students evolving into more pessimistic people?

So you’re sitting there, on WebAssign, and lo and behold, yet another problem you have no idea how to do.

You’re persistent though. You don’t give up that easily. That’s not how you got into Purdue. So you attempt it.

And proceed to hold your pencil, looking down at a blank sheet of paper for the next minute or two.

“Why didn’t my professor teach us any of this?” you think as you flip through your notes, again and again. “Now I have to teach myself something else. Great.”

This thought process has surely gone through the heads of most, if not all, college students. I mean, if the purpose of homework is to solidify our understanding of a topic that is never taught in class, what can we build upon if there is no foundation?

There is another, less pessimistic way to look at this whole situation — the more probable way.

Of the many reasons why people become professors is to share knowledge with others. In order to dedicate a part of one’s life to doing so, one must have a passion for either the topic being taught, sharing knowledge in general or both. So, as you can imagine, it could by easy for a professor to get carried away in the 50-to-110-minute time slot given to share their knowledge and forget to discuss the homework material.

This example is only one of many examples of pessimism I’ve observed so far occur in our generation. We’ve all encountered those stories from Facebook, such as the one below, and simply laughed it off as fake and completely forget that the purpose of stories is to convey a message, not to display realism.

And as you can see from the top comments, people are extremely cynical about these types of stories.

You may be thinking this is an inaccurate representation of our generation because it was posted on a page that specifically does this type of pessimistic view on stories like these; plus, it only has 95 likes, which means it’s not that popular.

Well, then to you my good reader, I invite you to visit this website run by a YouTube channel with over 21 million subscribers called Smosh and tell me that this view isn’t a general consensus.

I will admit that these stories probably more likely than not did not occur, but looking at these stories as a popularity grab is looking at it from a pessimistic side: one that states that the average human is a greedy, attention seeking being and if an action is at all not justified, then it was an attention grab. The other way to look at these stories is that maybe the author of the story was testing his/her creative writing skills and decided that the audience should be Tumblr. Maybe it actually did occur to that person or someone that person knew and wanted to share the incredible experience. Maybe it was some other obscure reason.

Another common example of this are comments on a reaction post that are oh-so-common on Facebook and Tumblr, or more specifically, when people say “me” or “this is literally me” in response to a gif displaying a reaction to a certain event. As opposed to being pessimistic about it and saying, “It’s not ‘literally’ you. Get over yourself,” some people should understand that in colloquial language, commenting something like “this is me” doesn’t literally mean that the person depicted in the gif is the commenter, but that the commenter shares a similar feeling regarding the subject to the depicted gif.

So why do we do this? Why are people so ready to grasp the bad things about a situation rather than the good?

Well, an obvious answer would be that people tend to remember what my last semester English teacher called “marked” events, or events that normally don’t happen. For example, at Purdue, an “unmarked” event would be seeing someone wearing a Purdue sweatshirt, whereas a “marked” event would be seeing someone wearing an “IU” sweatshirt.

So because our minds have evolved from the basic instinct to survive, our minds tend to pick negative events as the “marked” ones so that they don’t endanger us again in the future. Similarly, we pick out the negatives in things so that we can anticipate danger more easily and avoid it.

So when we encounter a story regarding an extremely lucky event, rather than feeling bad for that event not happening to us, we pick out the negative part of the story and point out the unlikeliness of its occurrence.

I’m sure to many other people this type of pessimism gets annoying, especially when you start noticing different types of pessimism.

For example, I overheard a conversation the other day while walking home about someone shouting “cheater’s never win”. So naturally, as someone in our generation would respond, another pair of people immediately said, “No, cheaters always win. That’s sort of the point of cheating.” However much you might agree with this and start moving on, this view is actually incorrect; the point of cheating is to increase one’s chance of winning, not definitively ensuring success. So, another by-product of this displayed pessimism, as I discovered, is a more closed-minded approach to the world and how it actually functions.

I wish that we, the people that will one day run the world, would stop looking at the pessimistic side of everything.

Which includes not whispering, “we’re screwed,” upon that realization.