it's a world which is changing, and generally for the worse Ah, but this is objectively wrong, by almost every metric (crime, security, murder, health, longevi

it's a world which is changing, and generally for the worse Ah, but this is objectively wrong, by almost every metric (crime, security, murder, health, longevity, happiness, poverty). What is getting worse is the general level of fear, and this comes from the fact that we can hear bad news faster and more generally than ever before, combined with our evolved nature to implicitly feel that everything that we hear about might personally affect us (see Dunbar's number), and clickbait tactics of news editors and the need to fill the 24 hour news cycle with sensationalism. Fear causes stress, and both fear and stress cause physically and socially damaging effects. To wit: I never met anyone affected (directly or indirectly) by the recent Ebola outbreak in any social environment (online or offline) to which I belong, but almost everyone I spoke to about it was afraid of it. That's not to diminish the effect on the (globally) few people it impacts, which is horrible and terrifying, so the imbalance is not at all universal. However, it's a fair assumption that fear of Zika is considerably more dangerous to the average person (globally) than the risk of the virus itself. Multiply this across all the other things that people are afraid of but that are actually less dangerous now than at any time in our recorded past, and you end up with fear being the most damaging change for the worse.