Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

The Urgency Instinct
Now or never! Learn Factfulness now! Tomorrow may be too late!
You have reached the final instinct. Now it is time for you to decide. This
moment will never come back. Never again will all these instincts be right
there at the front of your mind. You have a unique opportunity, today, right
now, to capture the insights of this book and completely change the way you
think forever. Or you can just finish the book, close it, say to yourself “that
was strange,” and carry on exactly as before.
But you have to decide now. You have to act now. Will you change the way
you think today? Or live in ignorance forever? It’s up to you.
You have probably heard something like this before, from a salesperson or
an activist. Both use a lot of the same techniques: “Act now, or lose the
chance forever.” They are deliberately triggering your urgency instinct. The
call to action makes you think less critically, decide more quickly, and act
now.
Relax. It’s almost never true. It’s almost never that urgent, and it’s almost
never an either/or. You can put the book down if you like and do something
else. In a week or a month or a year you can pick it up again and remind
yourself of its main points, and it won’t be too late. That is actually a better
way to learn than trying to cram it all in at once.
The urgency instinct makes us want to take immediate action in the face of
a perceived imminent danger. It must have served us humans well in the
distant past. If we thought there might be a lion in the grass, it wasn’t sensible
to do too much analysis. Those who stopped and carefully analyzed the
probabilities are not our ancestors. We are the offspring of those who decided
and acted quickly with insufficient information. Today, we still need the
urgency instinct—for example, when a car comes out of nowhere and we
need to take evasive action. But now that we have eliminated most immediate
dangers and are left with more complex and often more abstract problems, the
urgency instinct can also lead us astray when it comes to our understanding
the world around us. It makes us stressed, amplifies our other instincts and
makes them harder to control, blocks us from thinking analytically, tempts us
to make up our minds too fast, and encourages us to take drastic actions that
we haven’t thought through.

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We do not seem to have a similar instinct to act when faced with risks that
are far off in the future. In fact, in the face of future risks, we can be pretty
slothful. That is why so few people save enough for their retirement.
This attitude toward future risk is a big problem for activists who are
working on long timescales. How can they wake us up? How can they
galvanize us into action? Very often, it is by convincing us that an uncertain
future risk is actually a sure immediate risk, that we have a historic
opportunity to solve an important problem and it must be tackled now or
never: that is, by triggering the urgency instinct.
This method sure can make us act but it can also create unnecessary stress
and poor decisions. It can also drain credibility and trust from their cause. The
constant alarms make us numb to real urgency. The activists who present
things as more urgent than they are, wanting to call us to action, are boys
crying wolf. And we remember how that story ends: with a field full of dead
sheep.