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I also have a theory. Anxiety is increasing because anxiety sells. The right leaning sites raise anxiety about immigrants. Left leaning sites raise anxiety that

I also have a theory. Anxiety is increasing because anxiety sells. The right leaning sites raise anxiety about immigrants. Left leaning sites raise anxiety that Trump is on his way to becoming a dictator. Environmental sites raise anxiety about species going extinct. Business sites raise anxiety about increase regulation and taxes. Meanwhile, humans are the best off we have ever been. This is one of the most peaceful times in history. We have more opportunity and less inequality than before. For the first time in history, half our population is not subject to endless pregnancies and high maternal mortality. Women are valued not primarily for the child-bearing or child-rearing but for their ability to contribute to the full spectrum of society. In addition, we are more capable of dealing with the vagaries of nature. Take for example Ebola. We came up with treatments and then a vaccine. We also know how to control our environments. Air conditioning allows humans to live comfortably in some of the hottest climates on earth. We also know how to efficiently produce food, and more importantly to transport food from one area of the world to another. For energy, we are not dependent on cutting down trees for firewood. We can know harvest sunlight, wind, and atoms to create unthinkable amounts of energy. We are just on the cusp of having the capability to colonize another celestial body! Yet, it is not the good news that sells in our attention economy. It is bad news and fear and outrage.

ada1981 8y ago
What you are saying is true. However never before have we humans been on the cusp of ecological collapse.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  I don't know that this is true. Do previous ice ages not count? Or how about the plague? It seems that we've been near extinction at least a few times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck I'd also add that until the 1990s the threat of total nuclear annihilation of the human race (and probably other stuff) was very real. That was anxiety inducing.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
    I agree, and this time we have a lot more knowledge and tools for coping with ecological disasters.
    - kaybe 8y ago
      It would still be very much preferable to not have to do it.
- rjf72 8y ago
  Check out the global temperature record. [1] In particular this [2] is the temperature from ice core readings for the past 800k years. Modern humans evolved sometime around 300k years ago. Can you imagine going through such sharp changes with negligible technology? They were surviving through these changes with little more than furs and basic woodworking. Consider the first evidence of something as trivial as metalworking. It's required for basically any other meaningful task and can be achieved very easily. All you need is mud, ore, and fire. Nonetheless, it was incredibly difficult to discover. The first evidence of metalworking doesn't appear until around 11,000 years ago! And this is just the macro scale. Local game extinctions, droughts, disease, and so on were a constant and often fatal occurrence. So you might say that we're now just living through the first highly publicized possible collapse. Yet once again this also would not be true. While we now find these things laughable, at one time people took doomsday predictions very seriously. And throughout the centuries there are invariably influential religious figures (including, for instance, popes) that have offered doomsday predictions. So seriously were these taken that some figures have even been punished for making such predictions and then them not coming to pass. There were also things like the 'Great Conjunction of 1524'. This was an event that based on astrological reading that predicted the world would end with a new great flood. This led tens of thousands of Londoners to abandon their homes and head for higher ground. Ultimately, humans thinking they're all going to imminently die because of something outside their control is not a new phenomena. However, mass media is. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/media/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...
  - xyz0 8y ago
    With respect to your first point, life expectancy during those times was age 20-30. Their standards of living were more akin to the standards for animals in zoos than modern humans. Climate change isn't a religious doomsday prophecy. Since modern humans evolved 300k years ago, we've industrialized and created technologies that are accelerating the pace of the destruction of Earth. The claims in the article are based on verifiable science.
  - abathur 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
save_ferris 8y ago
I completely agree.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
> humans are the best off we have ever been This is too broad to be true. It's easily disproven with a single counterexample. I could guess what you actually meant, but the tiny details in sentences like these change so much meaning I better let you clarify if this was an important point you're making. Especially since you seem to be aiming to dismiss concerns about people who are not safe, I think it's important you be more specific.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  Ok here are some of the areas where we are better off than ever looking at humanity as a whole: * Infant mortality * Life expectancy * Maternal mortality * Global poverty * Opportunities for women * Global literacy * Ability to control pain * Knowledge Here is a more concrete example. Imagine you are going to be born as a baby girl in a random family on earth. In what other time would you have a better chance of having a decent life?
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    Thank you for clarifying, this is much easier to have a discussion about. I have two open questions, I won't try to make a counterclaim (that 2019 is worse), but I can point out where your position feels hollow to me and needs to be shored up. 1) If I accept what you're saying that for the average person life is better in 2019 than in 1950, that doesn't generalize to all humans. My assessment is that life has been pretty good for the average human regardless of the time period, and good governance is more about how bad we let it get for the marginalized few than how good it is in the average case. 2) You listed things that are better for the average human... Are you claiming that there is not an equal (or larger) set of things that's worse? For example: depression, loneliness, anxiety. If your children are all living but you rarely speak to them and are cripplingly lonely, is that a better outcome than having 7 children, four of whom died, and you live in an intact healthy family unit? (Also, as a side note knowledge is not monotonically increasing with "progress". The Catholic Church tried and partly succeeded at destroying all native language books in Central America, and replaced them with books that seemingly include much less knowledge. Social knowledge loss is one of my biggest concerns with modernity: More knowledge accessible to any individual, less knowledge stored in the overall system. Less culturally usable knowledge for most individuals. Another example: we're probably only just getting back to the same level of total beer making knowledge that was embodied in the system before the mass market beer system.)
mcantelon 8y ago
Anxiety sells and social media enables every person to play a part in signal boosting it.
artur_makly 8y ago
http://popularlogistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/HP4.jpg http://popularlogistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/HP4.j...
alvalentini 8y ago
Whilst the data you are referring to is correct, so is the data on climate change and the various degrees of impact that humanity will have on the hospitality of our planet for our own human race. In other words: some things are getting better, but others are getting so much worse that it might be for nothing.
mrnobody_67 8y ago
Read "Factfulness" (one of Bill Gate's Top 5 books)... or Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (or just watch the 15 min TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting_better_or_worse_a_look_at_the_numbers?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting... ) In most places, in most ways, the world is getting massively better than it even was 20 or 30 years ago...
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  Sure, if you conveniently exclude the environment.

ada1981 8y ago

What you are saying is true. However never before have we humans been on the cusp of ecological collapse.

malvosenior 8y ago
I don't know that this is true. Do previous ice ages not count? Or how about the plague? It seems that we've been near extinction at least a few times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck I'd also add that until the 1990s the threat of total nuclear annihilation of the human race (and probably other stuff) was very real. That was anxiety inducing.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  I agree, and this time we have a lot more knowledge and tools for coping with ecological disasters.
  - kaybe 8y ago
    It would still be very much preferable to not have to do it.
rjf72 8y ago
Check out the global temperature record. [1] In particular this [2] is the temperature from ice core readings for the past 800k years. Modern humans evolved sometime around 300k years ago. Can you imagine going through such sharp changes with negligible technology? They were surviving through these changes with little more than furs and basic woodworking. Consider the first evidence of something as trivial as metalworking. It's required for basically any other meaningful task and can be achieved very easily. All you need is mud, ore, and fire. Nonetheless, it was incredibly difficult to discover. The first evidence of metalworking doesn't appear until around 11,000 years ago! And this is just the macro scale. Local game extinctions, droughts, disease, and so on were a constant and often fatal occurrence. So you might say that we're now just living through the first highly publicized possible collapse. Yet once again this also would not be true. While we now find these things laughable, at one time people took doomsday predictions very seriously. And throughout the centuries there are invariably influential religious figures (including, for instance, popes) that have offered doomsday predictions. So seriously were these taken that some figures have even been punished for making such predictions and then them not coming to pass. There were also things like the 'Great Conjunction of 1524'. This was an event that based on astrological reading that predicted the world would end with a new great flood. This led tens of thousands of Londoners to abandon their homes and head for higher ground. Ultimately, humans thinking they're all going to imminently die because of something outside their control is not a new phenomena. However, mass media is. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/media/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...
- xyz0 8y ago
  With respect to your first point, life expectancy during those times was age 20-30. Their standards of living were more akin to the standards for animals in zoos than modern humans. Climate change isn't a religious doomsday prophecy. Since modern humans evolved 300k years ago, we've industrialized and created technologies that are accelerating the pace of the destruction of Earth. The claims in the article are based on verifiable science.
- abathur 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

save_ferris 8y ago

I completely agree.

erikpukinskis 8y ago

> humans are the best off we have ever been This is too broad to be true. It's easily disproven with a single counterexample. I could guess what you actually meant, but the tiny details in sentences like these change so much meaning I better let you clarify if this was an important point you're making. Especially since you seem to be aiming to dismiss concerns about people who are not safe, I think it's important you be more specific.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
Ok here are some of the areas where we are better off than ever looking at humanity as a whole: * Infant mortality * Life expectancy * Maternal mortality * Global poverty * Opportunities for women * Global literacy * Ability to control pain * Knowledge Here is a more concrete example. Imagine you are going to be born as a baby girl in a random family on earth. In what other time would you have a better chance of having a decent life?
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Thank you for clarifying, this is much easier to have a discussion about. I have two open questions, I won't try to make a counterclaim (that 2019 is worse), but I can point out where your position feels hollow to me and needs to be shored up. 1) If I accept what you're saying that for the average person life is better in 2019 than in 1950, that doesn't generalize to all humans. My assessment is that life has been pretty good for the average human regardless of the time period, and good governance is more about how bad we let it get for the marginalized few than how good it is in the average case. 2) You listed things that are better for the average human... Are you claiming that there is not an equal (or larger) set of things that's worse? For example: depression, loneliness, anxiety. If your children are all living but you rarely speak to them and are cripplingly lonely, is that a better outcome than having 7 children, four of whom died, and you live in an intact healthy family unit? (Also, as a side note knowledge is not monotonically increasing with "progress". The Catholic Church tried and partly succeeded at destroying all native language books in Central America, and replaced them with books that seemingly include much less knowledge. Social knowledge loss is one of my biggest concerns with modernity: More knowledge accessible to any individual, less knowledge stored in the overall system. Less culturally usable knowledge for most individuals. Another example: we're probably only just getting back to the same level of total beer making knowledge that was embodied in the system before the mass market beer system.)

mcantelon 8y ago

Anxiety sells and social media enables every person to play a part in signal boosting it.

artur_makly 8y ago

http://popularlogistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/HP4.jpg http://popularlogistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/HP4.j...

alvalentini 8y ago

Whilst the data you are referring to is correct, so is the data on climate change and the various degrees of impact that humanity will have on the hospitality of our planet for our own human race. In other words: some things are getting better, but others are getting so much worse that it might be for nothing.

mrnobody_67 8y ago

Read "Factfulness" (one of Bill Gate's Top 5 books)... or Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (or just watch the 15 min TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting_better_or_worse_a_look_at_the_numbers?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting... ) In most places, in most ways, the world is getting massively better than it even was 20 or 30 years ago...

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
Sure, if you conveniently exclude the environment.