Psychological adaptation to the apocalypse - meditate, or just be happy?

In this post, not exactly an upper, I point first to two in-your-face articles on how we ought to be afraid, very afraid, about humanity's future technological and ecological environment, and then note two pieces of writing on psychological adaptations that might dampen down the full turn on of our brains' fear machinery.

Novelist Jonathan Franzen does a screed very effective at scaring the bejesus out of us. His basic argument: “The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.” A chorus of criticism has greeted Franzen's article: "Franzen is wrong on the science, on the politics, and on the psychology of human behavior as it pertains to climate change." (See also Chrobak.)

And, for alarm on our looming digital environment, The 6,000 word essay by Glenn S. Gerstell, general counsel of the National Security, and summarized by Warzel, should do the job. The first nation to crack quantum computing (China or the US) will rule the world! 

So, how do we manage to wake up cheerful in the morning? Futurist Yuval Harari offers his approach in Chapter 21 of his book "21 Lessons for the 21st century," by describing his experience of learning to meditate, starting with the initial instructions (to observe your process of breathing) in his first Vipassana meditation course. He now meditates two hours every day.

The point is that meditation is a tool for observing the mind directly...For at least two hours a day I actually observe reality as it is, while for the other twenty-two hours I get overwhelmed by emails and tweets and cute-puppy videos. Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens or Homo Deus.

A glimmer of hopefulness can also be obtained by reading books in the vein of Pinker's "Enlightenment Now", which documents again and again, for many areas, how dire predictions about the future have not come to pass. The injunction here would be to be optimistic, not a bad idea, given the recent PNAS article by Lee et al. documenting that the lifespan of optimistic people, on average, is 11 to 15% longer.