Blog Post

How Collective Pessimism Can Destroy Your Reality (And What to Do About It)

What you think — and say out loud — holds far more power over your life than you realize.

Not long ago, I got a call from a longtime friend. One of his stories — the kind with just the right mix of suspense, drama, and mystery — that always makes me think someone should be recording these calls to write a screenplay. He asked me a favor: transfer a certain amount of money to his account back home. Without hesitation, I did. He was someone I trusted.

Days passed. The money never came back. I called. He answered with another story worthy of the big screen. Everything about him felt the same — except his word. And while the money itself wasn’t the worst part, losing faith in someone you’d respected for years most certainly was.

With this, I remembered what many entrepreneurs already know well: I have clients with bills of less than $120 unpaid, with more than ninety days to pay; clients who postpone services for negligible amounts; and a palpable slowdown in business throughout Hispanoamerica since 2025. Friends who talk about “the crisis”, the lack of work, and unfair competition from immigrants without legal documents in the country. And one, like everyone else, reads news, looks up statistics, and consumes information storms.

That’s when I remembered a short story by García Márquez.

In his masterful tale Something Very Serious Is Going to Happen in This Town, the Colombian Nobel laureate tells the story of how a single rumor — with no basis in fact — triggers a spiral of collective panic that ends up destroying the town from within. No outside force attacked it. It was the townspeople themselves, infected by fear and the narrative of disaster, who brought it all down.

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions.”— Lao Tzu

This story resembles, painfully, what many of us are living through today. Objectively, many people are navigating a genuinely difficult financial moment. But at the same time, we are actively co-creating a narrative that makes things worse — repeating it, amplifying it, sharing it. And as Stoic philosophy reminds us, our perception of reality ultimately shapes reality itself.

Marcus Aurelius put it plainly in his Meditations: life is what our thoughts make of it. This isn’t escapism. It’s a philosophical warning that has been relevant for two thousand years.

We live in the age of infobesity: an overdose of information, most of it engineered to generate fear, outrage, and dependence. The media, social networks, and even casual conversations have become megaphones for everyday apocalypse. A new supervirus. A political meltdown. Your football team’s results treated as though civilization itself is at stake.

“Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.”— Epictetus, Enchiridion

When we constantly view the world through the lens of everything we lack, we stop seeing what we have. Worse still, we stop fighting — because “everyone is in the same situation.” That collective resignation is the real danger. Not the crisis itself, but the passive acceptance that nothing can be done.

• If you still watch conventional television regularly, now is the time to stop. The fear-based business model does not help you solve a single real problem.
• If your friends spend most of their time talking about how bad everything is, step away from those conversations kindly but firmly. Pessimism is contagious — but so is optimism.
• Close whatever — at work or in your downtime — constantly feeds you reasons to feel powerless. Filtering your notifications isn’t cowardice: it’s mental hygiene.
• Walk for at least thirty minutes a day — no headphones, no podcasts, no news. Physical movement activates neurological problem-solving mechanisms that no screen can replicate.
• Actively seek out people who, in this very same difficult environment, are finding opportunities. They are few — but they exist. Their perspective is worth more than a hundred economic analyses.
• Keep a gratitude journal or a daily log of wins, however small. A mind that registers progress is physiologically less vulnerable to chronic stress.
• Spend time in nature — a park, a square, a garden. Our biophilic connection to natural environments reduces cortisol and improves decision-making in measurable ways.

Something worth naming directly: while most people are navigating hard times, a small number are thriving precisely because of the turbulence. While you freeze your decisions waiting for things to “get better,” others are buying assets, forging alliances, building businesses. The narrative of generalized catastrophe serves them well — it keeps you defenseless and distracted.

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”— Confucius

Projecting joy is not naivety. It is a strategic choice. Laughing at alarmist headlines is not a lack of empathy — it’s refusing to be consumed by what you cannot control. As Viktor Frankl — who survived Nazi concentration camps — taught us, we always retain the freedom to choose our attitude toward any given set of circumstances.

The town in García Márquez’s story was not destroyed by a real catastrophe. It was destroyed by the sum of thousands of fearful words that each resident repeated, believed, and acted upon as though they were true. The prophecy fulfilled itself.

Today, when pessimism takes over our collective narrative, we actively create the conditions for the very scenario we fear to arrive with greater force. Businesses that don’t invest because “nobody is buying” guarantee that nobody buys. People who don’t look for work because “there’s nothing out there” ensure they find nothing.

Recognizing this doesn’t solve structural problems. But it does allow you to see the part of the movie that — trapped in the noise — you’ve been missing entirely.

The question is not whether something terrible is about to happen. The question is whether you will be part of the rumor — or part of the solution.