“Britain is broken. Its best days have been and gone. Kids born in Britain today will have a worse life than their parents.” 

At almost any point in our history, you could probably have heard those three statements from an old man sitting alone in the corner of the local pub. Now you might hear them from your friends, your neighbours, your parents, your kids, people who vote like you, people who vote differently from you. You - more likely than not - believe some of those statements too. 

When we looked at recent data, we found that the ‘average’ person in the UK is now pessimistic about what’s ahead for the UK. And this sense of deep pessimism in the UK’s future is ticking up: around 70% of us are now pessimistic about the future of the country, up from around 50% in 2018. Most of us do not think that our children will be better off than we currently are. We think that the UK has somehow lost its way, and we don’t have much faith that it will correct its course - not now, nor in future years.

This pessimism breeds cynicism and grievance towards our key institutions. It damages our democracy, our social cohesion and our economy. People with high levels of grievance, a feeling that they have been treated unfairly, are twice as likely to hold a zero-sum mindset as those with low grievance. And we’ve found that pessimism about the national outlook is associated with lower trust in government, a weaker sense that people’s voices are heard, and a more negative view of the contribution that others, including immigrants, make to the country. Pessimism breeds radicalism, it allows populists to gain ground by capitalising on frustration with promises for wide-scale change. 

And persistent pessimism can itself become a constraint on growth. When people and businesses expect the future to be worse, those expectations shape how they behave: making them less willing to spend, invest, or take risks, even when the underlying economic conditions improve. The consequences are less investment in the future, a drift towards zero-sum protection, and a politics that makes fiscal constraint harder to maintain.  

The UK needs to fix its pessimism problem.

The story that we are often told is that this pessimism is just realism. It is an inevitable consequence of our collective lived experience: that things in the UK are really that bad, that our pessimism stems from the rising cost of living, from visible signs of stagnation and decline, from our own daily frustrations in dealing with the NHS, with our public services and - increasingly - with each other. The narrative is that the UK is therefore both fractious and fractured. That we are collectively becoming unhappier, less optimistic and less trusting.  

But this isn’t the whole picture. The widespread pessimism in the UK is real, but it can’t be explained as just a simple reflection of reality. There are three reasons.

First and perhaps most importantly, most people remain quietly optimistic about their own personal lives. In 2026, close to three quarters of people in the UK were still what you might call ‘individually optimistic’. They are generally satisfied with their lives, and optimistic about their own futures. Almost half of people still retain this sense of individual optimism, even if they hold pessimistic views about the country. You can see this clearly in our recent analysis of Eurobarometer data.

Second, most people remain positive about the places they live in. We are twice as likely to say that the UK is in a bad state, than to say that our local area is in a bad state. Demos recently found that our local communities are one of the few places where pride has risen over the past 15 years. And the way that we tend to talk about our local areas, when compared to the country, is with much greater positivity. We might use words like: nice, safe, peaceful, friendly, community - not broken, or failing. If our pessimism with the UK came from a deep dissatisfaction with our personal experiences, you would expect that to show up in how we view the places we spend our time - but it doesn't in the same way. 

And finally, it is not the case that life is getting worse for most people on every measure. There are well-rehearsed reasons for concern, of course: wages have stagnated, it is now much harder for younger generations to buy a house than it was twenty years ago, and healthy life expectancy, particularly in our most deprived areas, has declined. But crime is down, rates of relative poverty have fallen over past decades, as well as low pay. And if direct experience is the thing that shapes our sense of optimism in the country, you’d expect those groups who have been winners in recent years - whether that’s the wealthiest, who have overseen a wealth boom in recent decades, or pensioners, who’ve seen three times as much living standards growth as non-pensioners in the last two decades - to be much more optimistic about our future. But they’re not. Our view of the UK is perhaps shaped by more than just metrics.  

So most Britons are optimistic about their own future, but deeply concerned about Britain’s. We are satisfied with our lives, mostly happy with the areas we live, but deeply dissatisfied with the country we call home. 

We’ve been calling this the optimism gap: reflecting the seemingly discordant beliefs that most people in the UK still retain their sense of individual optimism, even while still believing that the country is off track and that things will not improve - not now, and not for future generations.

While this gap is not new, our sense of pessimism in the national outlook appears to be deepening. Alongside it, the share of people who are individually pessimistic is increasing. So, we wanted to better understand why. Through improved understanding, we think we can find solutions that help people feel more optimistic about both their own future and that of the country. 

We think there are three interlinked mechanisms that sustain the gap. Each mechanism works to help retain optimism in our own lives - often in our local areas - while also driving our sense of pessimism in the UK. 

1. Agency: we are more optimistic the more that we believe we can influence outcomes. 
2. Atomisation: the more connected we feel to other people and places, the more optimistic we are. 
3. Algorithms: our perception of the national picture is warped by algorithms and an information environment that boosts bad news and privileges the extraordinary. 

The mechanisms are not separate or distinct - in many ways, each reinforces the other. Taking each in turn.

Agency: we are more optimistic the more we believe we can influence outcomes 

The closer we are to an event, the more likely we are to think that we will have control over the outcome. Most people tend to believe that they have some kind of agency over their own lives, even if that sense of control is mostly illusory. The belief that you are in control of your own life and have genuine choices sits in lockstep with optimism and happiness.

This sense of agency features  in the optimism gap in two ways. First, we know that those who remain optimistic about their personal lives tend to base their optimism on aspects of their lives which are in their direct control. We heard this in focus groups we ran on this topic earlier this year. People told us that their reasons for optimism came primarily from people and places: their families, their friends, their careers and, to some extent, their local areas and communities. Only 56% disagree that they can influence decisions affecting their local area, compared to 72% of the country. 

Our culture can also diminish the sense of agency we feel over our own lives. There is an increasing share of individuals in the UK who are individually pessimistic: things are not going well for them, and they don’t think that they will improve. This group has sharply grown over the past eight years, up from 13% in 2018 to 23% in 2026. This group was much more likely to indicate that they feel they lack agency over their own lives: they’re more likely to report feeling economically insecure, and to believe their voice does not count. 

We think that this perceived lack of agency is also playing out in pessimism towards the national outlook. Many studies have emphasised the importance of personal agency to societal optimism. A really clear example is a 2025 study examining Singaporean’s attitudes - which found that subjective social mobility predicts both personal and societal optimism. In the UK, most people feel they have very little control over what happens at the national level. Despite the extraordinary turnover in political leadership over the past decade (seven prime ministers in a decade), people feel powerless to influence outcomes. The main parties are increasingly seen as ‘all the same’ and largely interchangeable. Politicians are widely viewed as in it for themselves and unaccountable. Why vote for change, if it won’t happen? The idea that your voice doesn’t count, a sentiment that has risen over the past eight years, is correlated with feelings of national pessimism.

Not only did many feel that they personally have no control over the direction of the UK but also that those in charge had lost control, that they lacked agency. Over what was happening to our public services and economy; over what was happening at the border; over how we are perceived on the international stage. For many, this fuelled the sense that the UK was heading in the wrong direction, reduced their trust in key institutions and perpetuated a widely-held belief that there is no way to turn the ship around.

Conversely, the smaller number of people that were optimistic about the direction of the country were more likely to demonstrate that they had self-efficacy; they were more likely to think that their voice carried weight, to be satisfied with democracy and other key institutions. From those we spoke to in focus groups, they had some residual belief that if they tried, they could in some way influence outcomes on the national level.

Agency - having or lacking it - is intertwined with our sense of optimism about our own future and the country.

Atomisation: the more connected we feel to people and places, the more optimistic we are

We understand ourselves through the groups that we belong to. Our identities are shaped not only by our individual characteristics, but by our family, friendships and communities that create a sense of belonging and shared purpose. For many people, these close relationships remain strong. We continue to trust our neighbours, value our local communities and places, and derive meaning from the people around us.

But that sense of connection does not always extend much further. Our belief that people across the country share our values, interests and a common future is becoming weaker. We heard it in focus groups: 

You also see it play out across the UK in data: 84% of us now feel that the country is divided. Over half of people report feeling disconnected from society, and just shy of half of us say that we occasionally feel like a stranger in our own country. We feel that we are much less able to relate to those who aren’t directly in our lives. It's having an impact on how connected we perceive we are to others throughout the country: many young people now struggle to be friends with people who hold different values to them. 

In many ways, you can argue that the UK has socially fragmented. For many, the experience of the recent decades (the pandemic, huge changes to technology) has dampened our ability to bridge across different social groups, even if our bonds within groups have stayed mostly resilient. 

We think this helps to explain the gap between our individual optimism, our local optimism, and our national pessimism. Optimism rests on our close bonds, or our direct experiences with our immediate circles and places. We still mostly feel connected to our local places and communities: and those who held optimistic views were particularly more likely to say that they felt connected to their local area. 

But our national pessimism reflects weaker bonds at the national level - and our perceived lack of collective identity. As Demos recently found, local attachment no longer reinforces national pride - the two have decoupled. Our analysis found that people who held pessimistic views were less likely to report feeling connected to the UK. And they were much less likely to hold positive views towards ‘outsiders’; to feel that immigrants contribute positively to the UK. As our sense of national identity weakens, it perhaps becomes harder for most people to see newcomers as contributing to a shared national story that we all share. 

Therefore when we feel more connected to each other as a nation, we are more optimistic about our collective future. There is some evidence that this happened during the early years of the pandemic. There was a big spike in optimism about the country’s future in 2021 to 2022. While there will be many reasons for this - the country did at that time appear to have brighter days ahead of it - we also think this increased sense of collective optimism may in some way be connected to our shared experience of Covid-19. In focus groups, people referenced the pandemic, and the feeling of the country coming together, as one of the last times that they felt truly connected to those around them outside of their immediate circles. It was also the period with the highest trust in democracy, government and political parties.

There’s a sharp cost to us turning inwards. As long as our lives move along without friction, our lack of collective identity and inability to relate to one another doesn’t necessarily pose a problem. But when we enter choppier waters, politically and socially, atomisation can amplify instability. We saw this with the 2024 riots, where places with the lowest social connection were more likely to experience violence. 

The evidence also suggests that the weakening of our imagined national community is at least partly a matter of perception rather than reality. Although a vast majority of people say the country feels divided, there is little evidence that our underlying values have become substantially more polarised. Britons have, if anything, become more tolerant over time. We might feel further apart from one another than we actually are. Which leads us on to our third mechanism.

Algorithms: our perception of the national picture is warped by algorithms that boost bad news and privilege the extraordinary

Our direct experiences are unmediated. They tell us that we can trust our neighbours, because we chatted to them at the letterbox. That our local GP is kind, because they were decent to our child when they were sick. That the park is safe, because we see children playing in it after school. Where our direct experiences are positive, they contribute to our own sense of individual optimism. (And conversely, where our direct experiences are negative, they also contribute to our sense of pessimism). 

But our evidence of what is happening throughout the UK is also filtered and shaped by our information environment. We don’t experience society at large directly - we experience stories about society. These stories are not just told by the traditional media - which fewer of us than ever now trust - and which has long traded on the belief that the best way to capture attention is through biasing the negative: the common, “if it bleeds, it leads,” refrain. Social media and smartphone use is now largely ubiquitous for adults in the UK. Algorithmically-driven newsfeeds and platforms that are designed to capture attention now in many ways determine the information and news we access. And that attention is held through privileging the inflammatory and the false, through narrowing the range of perspectives we see and crowding out any kind of disconfirmatory evidence to keep us engaged. Hate, rage and anger are all feelings that drive views. Hate, rage and anger - these are now some of the primary evidence filters we use to interpret what is happening across the UK. 

To take one example, we know that social media can create an exaggerated sense of crime and disaster in their people’s neighbourhoods. So even though serious crime in the UK is on the decline, many people tend to think that it is on the increase. We heard this in focus groups:

And it plays out elsewhere. While there are legitimate concerns about petty crime and theft in the capital, some people now think that London is close to a state of total societal collapse. Legitimate raw videos of visible thefts, which are then exaggerated and amplified by content creators, flood social media feeds. They paint a picture of a city where crime runs rampant and uncontrolled. These videos are impacting tourism and investment in London - as well as the general sense of wellbeing in the city. This too may be fuelling our national pessimism.

It's not just that our newsfeeds now serve us the bad, the angry, the violent - they also show us the unattainable. Social media is increasingly like television. We now spend very little time viewing content posted by our friends. Instead, we watch algorithmic feeds of strangers - primarily influencers, whose lives are far from mundane or ordinary. Social media gives us a ringside view into the lives of those who are richer, wealthier and more attractive than us. It's warping our sense of what’s real and what is attainable. It is likely contributing to the growing share of individuals within the UK who are pessimistic about their own lives. 

While humans have always been comparative creatures, social media may be changing who we now view as a fair comparator. Our own sense of individual optimism might depend less on where we are today, than where we think we stand in relation to others. Before social media, we compared ourselves to those around us - who tended to be similar to us in income and class. Because we knew them, we could explain the differences between us. Now, our ringside view gives us only others’ highlights, without the reasons why those highlights exist. We don’t know why the people we see on social media are wealthy, and as others have discussed, we might not even really think about it. It just sits as a fact: others have things that we don’t. So, rather than keeping up with the Joneses, we may all be trying to keep up with the Kardashians. 

Some have looked at how a distorting sense of social comparison plays into our sense of optimism and pessimism in other ways. Looking back at our first mechanism - agency - it's not just that life is harder for some people - if it is. It’s that many people now no longer believe they are on an upwards trajectory - that life will get better for them and those around them. This has also been described as the “Nietzschean Trap” - the idea that everyone can now find a dimension (inheritance, income, education, health) in which they are an underdog, and that to succeed they will need to struggle against the odds. Not everyone can be an underdog. But this distorted sense of the average may be eroding our sense of individual agency. Why bother if success is unlikely? Why try harder if you can see you won't get ahead? Fuelled by algorithms and fed by social media, everyone can now find a grievance - some cross they bear that they feel puts them behind the pack. And it may be making us more miserable. 

Perhaps the feeling people are left with is best described like this: most know a lot is going on, but no one can really tell what. And they're no longer sure what 'normal' or 'good' looks like - for themselves or for the country. When the evidence we have about anything beyond our direct experience is distorting, inflammatory and often false, it's understandable that we feel pessimistic about both our own lives and the country's future.

The optimism gap might look something like this: 

• our individual optimism is sustained through a combination of our micro experiences. 
• our collective pessimism is sustained through a combination of our macro perceptions.

When each is taken together, the net-effect of the optimism gap is that we are turning inwards. Our optimism in our own lives is sustained by our micro-experiences: what is close to us, what we directly see and what we think we can control. 

Our pessimism in the national picture is based on a growing feeling and perception that, outside of our immediate circle of control and connection, we have no control and connection.

Agency: using devolution and public control to demonstrate the UK - the government and the public - is shaping its own destiny 

This is already a core part of the Burnham agenda. He’s argued that Britain has been on the wrong path since the 1980s and his focus is restoring public control. Whether you agree with it or not, in large parts of the economy the state has moved from an owner and operator to a regulator. Fifty years ago, the public could more easily see how the state was shaping the direction of the country because it ran and built things - sometimes well, sometimes badly, but visibly. Now it is further in the background, attempting to shape outcomes from the backseat, but still on the hook for minimising harms. Too often, the state resembles the complaints department of our economic infrastructure - sent out to face consumers who are unhappy with their service, but without any way to fix the problem even if it wanted to. People feel powerless when they see their bills rise and see the government as powerless to help. 

Burnham's public control agenda promises to take on major pieces of the economic infrastructure that shape our lives, along with areas like social care - long a source of public frustration, and long stuck in a stalemate of the state's own making. The message is that this government will at least try to act where its predecessors did not. But that will take time and money. Alongside this, the government will need to show willingness to act on other issues that breed a sense of powerlessness. Immigration is one. It needs to keep reducing boat crossings while showing it can respond to the parts of the current migration agenda that irritate the public - using a temporary visa scheme to end hotel use quickly, or devolving immigration fees so that places with higher migration get more money for public services.

Technology is another. Greater control here could mean building digital public infrastructure rather than renting it from foreign hyperscalers, putting more British capital to work at home by consolidating our pension funds, and giving the public a far more visible stake in how AI is used to solve national problems.

The devolution side of Burnham’s agenda will be an important part of demonstrating a more agentic state too. After all, evidence suggests that proximity to decisions can increase people’s sense of agency and support. For more people to feel they have a voice, Burnham’s devolution agenda must also meaningfully devolve power over decision-making to the public. One way would be to improve the feedback loops between the government or public services and the public. There are lots of models for how to deliver meaningful public engagement - including tools developed by Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence - which have been used by public institutions to collaborate with the public and build trust. Scaling up these methods should be explored. Citizens assemblies could also be leveraged more effectively and regularly when there are no clear answers. Electoral reform would be one step further.

Giving places greater control over the decisions that affect them shape the country’s direction  - accompanied by meaningful opportunities for public engagement - could make politics feel less distant. This would reinforce the link between local places and the outlook  of the country.

Atomisation: a renewed focus on community, shared experience and identity 

Much of the government’s community agenda is deeply local. Pride in Place is a good example - it invests in the places people live, and aims to give people more control over them. We need to continue to strengthen the bonds that people feel with their local areas, but evidence suggests this will be insufficient to change people’s perceptions of the UK. They are separate and distinct. 

Instead, we need to think more deliberately about the connections that exist between our communities and about the experiences, institutions and traditions that give people a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves. These forms of identity and connections - or macro-social capital - are a key mechanism through which national cooperation is achieved. With pride in our shared institutions splintering: the BBC, the NHS, the Royal Family, the flag - there are fewer shared symbols that give us that sense of collective identity. And as a country we have tended to not be strategic about how we nurture these common assets.  

Strengthening this could look like creating more shared experiences and deliberately capitalising on the common areas of unity like football. Compared to other countries, Britain has fewer moments in which large numbers of people participate in the same thing at the same time. Others have created or nurtured them in more structured ways. In France, Bastille Day crystallises around a single national moment. In the Netherlands, orange floods the streets and cities turn into free markets on King’s Day. In Singapore, the People’s Association organises celebrations through community clubs and neighbourhoods nationwide. The UK should find its own equivalent that fits the way we view ourselves.

Algorithms: taking back control of the information environment 

A century ago, the arrival of the radio forever changed who controlled information and how people understood the world around them. The government decided that these changes to our information environment were too significant to be left entirely to the market: for our national security, identity and prosperity. The BBC was created to ensure that the most powerful new medium of the age would serve a wider public purpose. 

Today, social media platforms shape what we see about the world, what we talk about and ultimately how we understand the society we live in. They drive our perceptions of what is happening throughout the country. With radio, and subsequently TV, the state chose to be a curator. Now it’s just one of many content creators. It’s tried to use regulation to mitigate online harms, but the response to the under-16s social media ban suggests the public does not see this as sufficient. 

Trump’s America is an unlikely place to look for inspiration on what else could be done. The White House saw the rise of TikTok and its growing influence over Americans as a threat. Its response - to insist on a separate company, independent from the Chinese parent firm and run by a majority American board, to be considered for social media firms operating in the UK. 

We could also go harder on regulation - shaping the design choices that determine what people see, including features such as infinite scroll. People should have greater control over what they see and how they see it. This includes the ability to opt out of personalised feeds, and to move your data and preferences between platforms. 

Regulation alone will not build the digital public sphere that we need. More can be done to protect parts of the media that need bolstering in today’s world - for example, through giving greater protection to the prominence of public-service media. We also need to proactively build a better information ecosystem. This could look like establishing a dedicated venture studio for the digital public sphere. It could bring together partners like the BBC, government, universities and innovators. The studio could design, prototype, and scale open-source public service infrastructure, democratic participation tools and pro-agency products - built around public rather than commercial interests. By demonstrating viable alternatives at national scale, these interventions could help reshape public expectations of the digital environment, and shift the wider market towards models that better serve democratic resilience and public good. 

Taken together - greater public control could increase the agency we feel over the national stage. A less corrosive, more balanced, information environment could restore our perceptions of the state. And a greater sense of connection to the UK could make us more optimistic about our future. 

We don't think Britain is fated to remain a country of collective pessimists. The three forces set out above are part of what got us here - and could also open the door to something better.