2024: When Pleasure Peaks and Pain Plateaus

9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,

Beep.

Happy New Year!!!

Turn by turn, every 60 minutes, 24 times in the day, the people of all lands within each 15-degree longitude of the earth’s globe will celebrate the coming of a new year together.

The pleasantness of Christmas peaks at 0000 hours on January 1st and many expect pain to plateau, too. But such positive thinking never works. Otherwise, the world would be full of pleasures and free of pain by now.

Hope is human. Collective daydreaming isn’t.

What works is to expect pleasure to decrease and for pain to increase - that food crops will decrease naturally unless they are cultivated again, against all the odds of an infertile and insecure land. And to be assured that thorns will increase naturally unless they are hindered. 

The resolve to work against these natural negative expectations forms the background to every vocation of man.

Welcome to 2024. No illusions.

Pain on Jos Plateau

The President never mentioned the December 23-25 wanton bloodletting in Bokkos, Barkin Ladi, Mangu and Wase Local Government Areas of Plateau State in his speech.

That worries many. 

At best, the president’s public relations team can plead that this presidency does not work in real-time. 

They simply write their good wishes for the new year and go to sleep. And while Nigeria’s shepherds slept at noon, angels of death came to update President Tinubu and his team that a little child was crying frantically at the back of his slain mother.

Nigeria is not good at census. Yet when they say over 195 people - children, teenagers, adults and the aged - were hacked to death and buried in collective graves, believe it is not less than that number.

“The New Year speech as delivered by the president clearly shows that he was not adequately informed of the current realities. A lot of burning national issues were not addressed in his speech – issues of the military error committed in Tudun Biri (that wiped out over 120 innocent people in Kaduna), the kidnapped youth corps members, and so many other serious security issues, which he failed to address,” Adamu Umar Zakari wrote on Daily Trust.

Gore and pain will never cease in Plateau State until an irresponsible General is summarily dismissed and replaced with a Colonel who can get the job done. Insecurity and pain will never plateau anywhere in Nigeria until an entitled Inspector General is fired and replaced with a serious-minded, humane Inspector.

Neither prayers nor positive thinking will work in Nigeria this year. No such things work anywhere. Right actions exalt a country, but wrong actions bring reproach to the psyche and bodies of the people of any country.

Sorry to hurt the feel-good faith. It’s the only way to halt a painful fate. 

Pleasure flights on Nigeria Air

Statements like “I'm an unrepentant believer in a national carrier flying the Nigerian flag” smack of positive thinking about the country and can be praised for their patriotic, or even prophetic, tang. 

The thing is, statements like these are not backed up by knowledge of any serious plan and effort to realise the goal. And clutching to them brings nothing but disappointment and depression or a stronger delusion that this dream would materialise somehow.

The empty belief in Nigeria Air has proven to be a fantasy. Five years since that statement, Nigeria Air has been suspended, re-funded, unveiled, launched, flown, and disappeared right before our eyes.

Such is the fate of anyone who believes that the entity called Nigeria would be fine this year anyhow.

Pleasure Now, Pain Later

There is evidence that Nigeria’s rulers at the local, state, and federal levels would bring the country and its citizens closer to a ruinous end in 2024 if they continue to mouth sweet nothings into the ears of the citizens without changing their profligate ways.

Though empty fantasy brings pleasure and relieves emotional pain in the short run, it certainly results in failure coupled with symptoms of depression in the long run.

Three Psychologists, Gabriele Oettingen, Doris Mayer, and Sam Portnow, add to these existing evidence that positive thinking leads to low performance and sad reality in the end. 

In Pleasure Now, Pain Later: Positive Fantasies About the Future Predict Symptoms of Depression, their empirical study shows that those who think things would pan out well, without measurable efforts towards achieving that result, risk disappointment and depression in the long run:

“Though common sense suggests that positive thinking shelters people from depression, the four studies reported here showed that this intuition needs to be qualified: 

“Positive thinking in the form of fantasies about the future did indeed relate to decreased symptoms of depression when measured concurrently; however, positive fantasies predicted more depressive symptoms when measured longitudinally. 

The pattern of results was observed for different indicators of fantasies and depression, in adults and in schoolchildren, and for periods of up to 7 months... 

In college students, low academic success partially mediated the predictive relation between positive fantasies and symptoms of depression... Results add to existing research on the problematic effects of positive fantasies on performance by suggesting that indulging in positive fantasies predicts problems in mental health.

Unlike many clerics, Sam Adeyemi, in Strategic Foresight for 2024, warned too that strategic thinking is expecting disruptions rather than stability and preparing for it. He stressed that those who will thrive in the new year 2024 would be those who expect things to get worse on the economic, political and personal fronts and prepare ahead for these scenarios.

Strategic thinkers all over the world are already calibrating the risks that would likely present a material crisis on a global scale in 2024.

Pressure now, Pleasure Later

Let’s get closer to reality.

The World Economic Forum's global risk projection may be a starting point for realistic expectations of instability and preparing and acting to thrive in spite of them. 

Of course, one loses nothing if those expected negative disruptions don’t eventually happen.

Here is a snapshot of what to expect to happen around the world that may affect Nigeria and that you need to prepare for in case Nigeria’s rulers are still daydreaming as usual.

The World Economic Forum projects:

• Environmental risks could hit the point of no return

• As societal polarization grows and technological risks remain unchecked, ‘truth’ will come under pressure

• Economic strains on low- and middle-income people – and countries – are set to grow. This includes the economic risks of Inflation and Economic downturns.

• Simmering geopolitical tensions combined with technology will drive new security risks 

• Ideological and geoeconomic divides will disrupt the future of governance

However, at the global level, there are decreasing opportunities for action to address these risks in a fragmented world. The World Economic Forum projects that “Cooperation will come under pressure in this fragmented, in-flux world. 

“However, there remain key opportunities for action that can be taken locally or internationally, individually or collaboratively – that can significantly reduce the impact of global risks. 

“Localized strategies leveraging investment and regulation can reduce the impact of those inevitable risks that we can prepare for, and both the public and private sector can play a key role to extend these benefits to all. 

“Single breakthrough endeavors, grown through efforts to prioritize the future and focus on research and development, can similarly help make the world a safer place. 

“The collective actions of individual citizens, companies and countries may seem insignificant on their own, but at critical mass they can move the needle on global risk reduction. 

“Finally, even in a world that is increasingly fragmented, cross-border collaboration at scale remains critical for risks that are decisive for human security and prosperity,” the WEF concludes.

When pleasure peaks at the start of this new year, pain plateaus only when we respond individually, locally, and internationally to real human pressures. Then pain will wane and give place to pleasure in 2024.

Thanks for reading this Data Dive. See you next week on the realistic side of hope. Happy New Year!