GoKawiilEvery week, it seems, a fresh opinion poll leads to shocking headlines: never have people been more afraid of the future, believed that their children won’t be as well off as them, or thought that their country is going in the wrong direction.
Feelings of gloom about what lies ahead are particularly rife in the Western world. At first glance, this makes sense: there are plenty of reasons to be worried, from the prospect of war to an artificial-intelligence apocalypse and climate change.
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In 2026, two out of five US respondents told pollsters that they think that the United States won’t exist in 2276, when it should turn 500 (see go.nature.com/4gdgmvx). The majority of respondents to another poll thought that in 2050, compared with now, the country would be less important in the world and more politically divided, and its economy would be weaker1. The United Kingdom and France ranked well below the global average in a 2025 survey of people’s views of their country’s economic prospects, alongside nations such as Lebanon and Morocco (see go.nature.com/4x5zrmc).
Yet, elsewhere in the world, the future seems brighter. A study by the United Nations children’s charity UNICEF2, spanning 55 countries, found that each population had different feelings about what lies ahead, regardless of shared challenges.
Your feelings about the future depend not so much on observable, objective facts but on personal features ranging from where you live to income level, culture and age. Here’s how.
Demographic trends
Optimism is not a rational assessment of coming reality, as scientists thought until the 1960s. Instead, it is “a mood or attitude associated with an expectation about the social or material future — one that the evaluator regards as socially desirable”, as anthropologist Lionel Tiger wrote in Optimism (1979).
And this mood or attitude is much more about possibility and direction than about a pleasant present day, meaning that current wealth and happiness are no ingredients for optimism about the future.
This helps to explain why optimism is found mainly in low- and middle-income countries (see ‘Mixed outlook’). Four in five (82%) young Indonesians (aged 15–24) think that the world is becoming better with each generation, whereas only half as many (42%) young people in France said the same22.
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