The Pessimist’s Reading List

10 books to deprogram the most dismal, dour doomer

Photo by American Dreaming

It’s easy to get the impression that modernity sucks and the world is on fire. It’s what most of us seem to think. Whether it’s moral standards, education, racial equality, global peace, the institution of the family, the economy, social divisions, or the outlook for the next generation, somewhere between a plurality and a supermajority of Americans take a decidedly dim view of the future.

Even though positive headlines outnumber negative ones overall (when we factor in sports, entertainment, fashion, etc.), within the weightiest areas of the news — politics, government, business, public health, the environment, and world affairs — the coverage is overwhelmingly negative. And studies show that not only do negative headlines generate more clicks, each additional negative word used in headlines of average length increases the click-through rate by 2.3 percent. We have become doom junkies. This is reflected in our gratuitously grim and post-apocalyptic pop culture landscape as well as a political discourse laden with the most catastrophized and superlative language.

Except, our doomerism is unfounded. It is born of negativity bias, historical ignorance, peer pressure, the widespread error of confusing malcontentment for sophistication, and, for an unfortunate few, a warped approach to activism that fears and hates the very progress it purports to fight for. As a counterweight to these prevailing gloomy attitudes, I’ve put together a reading list of 10 books that offer different, more empowering perspectives than those we typically encounter. I’ve broken them into four categories. The first corrects mistaken notions about the state of the world today by illustrating the colossal progress humanity has made over time. The second offers a hopeful and optimistic vision of the future. The third considers the incredible potential we have to transform the world. And the fourth, which may seem the most tangential, but is, in fact, the most crucial, explores the way we think, perceive, and experience life and existence.

The Present

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2010) by Steven Pinker

Beginning with archeological evidence from human prehistory and proceeding through thousands of years of historical records, Steven Pinker exhaustively documents the massive decline of violence in virtually every conceivable domain. These include war, genocide, mass murder, terrorism, homicide, suicide, riots, brawls, violent crime, rape and sexual assault, child abuse, domestic violence, duels, animal cruelty, capital punishment, slavery, tribal violence, ritual human sacrifice, violence against minority groups, and violent sports/spectacles. Pinker attributes this across-the-board decline to a variety of factors, such as economic interdependence, the increasing influence of women over time, the rise of legal systems and stable governments, and the gradual growth in knowledge and scientific understanding, among others.

However alarmed you think you are about the danger and violence in society today, Better Angels will provide some serious perspective — and more than a little appreciation.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) by Steven Pinker

In many ways, this book is best seen as a sequel to Better Angels. Whereas the first installment examined violence in particular, Enlightenment Now takes a look, in much the same systematic way, at a far broader range of areas in which humanity has made tremendous progress. These include health, wealth, safety, peace, quality of life, knowledge, democracy, equality, human rights, basic freedoms, environmental protections, and more. In less than 600 pages, Pinker effectively debunks years’ worth of depressive doom-scrolling. As I colorfully characterized the vigor with which he attacks his thesis in my original GoodReads review: “On page after page, Pinker methodically swings his optimist’s baseball bat into the face of pessimism, bludgeoning it with such a relentless barrage of facts, figures, and charts that it cannot help but slink whimperingly off to die in euphoric bliss.” In all seriousness, Pinker’s Progress Duology, to give it a name, is a much-needed antidote to modern “sky is falling” narratives.

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America (2024) by Coleman Hughes 

There is no shortage of available books that criticize the radical social justice ideologies of the 2010s and 20s, but in doing so, most succumb to an outlook every bit as negative and hyperbolic as those they criticize. In The End of Race Politics, Coleman Hughes takes a more targeted and measured approach. He makes a strong case for racial progress, argues that many today have disregarded the key insights of our most celebrated civil rights pioneers, and presents a hopeful and achievable vision of a fairer and freer future for everyone. This isn’t another partisan polemic painting “woke” people as society’s greatest menace, but rather a nuanced rebuttal to misguided ideas and a data-backed roadmap that charts how far we’ve come to plot our next destination. 

The Future

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (2012) By Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

A forward-looking book that challenges the prevailing mindset of scarcity, Abundance identifies the biggest challenges facing humanity and builds a compelling case for how innovation, cooperation, risk-taking, and new technologies can nourish, educate, heal, free, and fuel a flourishing and growing global population. Abundance is a breath of fresh air — the kind of can-do rallying cry that was once emblematic of generations past (especially in America) and has since fallen out of fashion. In the years since its publication, we can see what Diamandis and Kotler got right, what hasn’t aged well, and what hasn’t yet transpired. On the whole, Abundance holds up, but it’s the attitude it espouses that I found infectious when I read this nine years ago, and boy could we use a lot more of it.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994) by Carl Sagan

In an extreme zoom out, Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot puts human affairs into a more cosmic perspective. Viewing planet Earth and humanity from a vast distance, Sagan weaves scientific insight with poetic prose to emphasize how precious and fragile humans are, how all of our bitterest enmities don’t amount to a hill of beans, and how all we have at the end of the day is each other. The book offers both a stern warning about our responsibility to posterity and a hopeful vision of how the future can play out as we reach for the stars. I’ll leave you with one of the most moving passages:

“Look again at that dot. [Earth viewed from the edge of the solar system]. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

The Possible

The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (2009) by Peter Singer

The endless flow of overhyped problems too big for regular people to meaningfully do anything about instills in folks a sense of helplessness and ultimately despair. The fact is, however, that individuals have enormous power to change the world for the better. In The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer provides us with perhaps the single most salient example. By breaking down the state of extreme poverty, and taking a scientific view of charitable and philanthropic donations, Singer makes the case for why we — not just the wealthy, but everyday people in the developed West — can, with negligible personal cost and effort, literally save lives. The Life You Can Save does more than challenge societal attitudes, it directly challenges, empowers, and inspires the reader. This is one of the rare books that won’t merely change your mind — it will change your behavior. It did for me.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (2011) by David Deutsch

A truly mind-blowing read, The Beginning of Infinity offers a radical new way to view and frame the world — through the lens of explanations. With surgical prose and clear logic, physicist and quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch gets you thinking like a Martian, no longer constrained by mundane considerations and irrelevant distractions, but focused on a central, revolutionary insight that, once glimpsed, cannot be unseen. Namely, anything that does not violate the laws of nature is possible, and every mistake, so long as it does not destroy our knowledge-creating process, is recoverable. It’s difficult to articulate in a paragraph how profound this way of viewing the world is. It all seems abstract, even commonsensical. And yet it isn’t, and its many implications, which Deutsch fascinatingly explores at length, are well worth reading.

The Mind

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (2008) by William B. Irvine

Irvine’s Guide to the Good Life is generally considered the best introduction to Stoicism, and for good reason. As I wrote in my original GoodReads review: “A well-structured and marvelously practical work, Irvine doesn't merely recite history or explore and analyze ideas, he does what modern philosophy has forgotten how to do: he tells you how to use these ideas to make your life better.”

This goes well beyond self-help. Everything we experience in life relies on our minds. Everything we do, say, think, or feel originates from and is filtered through our brains. Coming to better understand yourself, see things in perspective, appreciate what you have, be less neurotic, and generally just be a wiser person — which, in my experience, many Stoic (and Buddhist) teachings can help with — is foundational to having a healthy and reasoned view of the world. A Guide to the Good Life is also a guide to the sane life.

One Blade Of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir (2019) by Henry Shukman

I’ve read a fair number of books on Eastern philosophy. Shukman’s memoir captures in prose, with greater eloquence and precision than anything I’ve come across, some of the most useful, transformative, and otherwise ineffable insights into the nature of conscious experience that nondual wisdom traditions attempt to impart. An absorbing read simply as a gorgeously written memoir of a troubled, neurotic, and anxious young man’s search for peace, One Blade of Grass won’t bring you “enlightenment” per se, but you’ll close the book a wiser person than you opened it.

The Bell and the Blackbird (2018) by David Whyte

I’m rounding out this list with a poetry collection from the Irish poet David Whyte. The Bell and the Blackbird draws on Whyte’s life and travels as well as Zen-inspired insights to explore the nature of experience — the way things always already are, and the beauty and calm that’s always there, if only we got out of our own way to see it. The collection also exists in audio form, and Whyte’s gravelly recitations are wonderful. Here’s the title poem to whet your appetite. 

Happy reading. :)

See also:

“The Coma Patient's Political Reading List”

“The Liberal Arts Crash Course”

“The Ingrate’s Prayer”

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