In a small minority
16% if you include the “Bad but getting better” group. The checkmark indicates for which option I voted.
There are several negative factors to consider in this poll. First, it is obviously a self-selected pool, hence inherently not representative of the general population. Second, the potential pool is small because the originator is not well known, nor does s/he represent a well-known organisation. Third, I suspect that many people didn’t actually read and understand the full question.
On the positive side, this poll was done on Mastodon, which in my experience so far has a fairly liberal (small l) membership. If anyone would be expected to respond with a positive outlook, it would be this group. Doing this poll on “the bird site” would, I’m pretty sure, skew far more into negative territory. Further, based on other polls I’ve seen on Mastodon, the uptake would not be nearly this good on the other site.
Another consideration is that the site on which this user is resident is based in Europe. It is run by the creator of Mastodon, who is in Germany. While any federated server’s users can access and participate in such a profile and poll, the likelihood is that the majority of responses would come from the home server’s users.
I read through the comments associated with this poll. They were all well-considered and thoughtful. There was not a single troll post. On Twitter most of the comments would be abusive, misogynistic, or otherwise of low quality.
What is one to make of this? If even a group that is highly likely to be more positive in outlook than a random selection of the population has such an overwhelmingly negative outlook on the state of our world, where does that put those of us that do not share this negativity?
I, for one, prefer to agree with Monty Python… “Always look on the bright side of life!” It is a personal choice. I choose to think that the future will be better than the past, or present. Clearly there will be rough times on the way, but the overall trend of the human condition is toward general improvement. The Zeitgeist is the sum of individual attitudes, and I choose to make my minuscule contribution to that spirit a positive one. Please join me in doing so!
P.S. Should you be interested in joining Mastodon, check out https://mstdn.ca/invite/iCTorGsQ for the main Canadian server, or https://joinmastodon.org/ for the main portal.