While I love to be a gloomy asshole as much as anyone else, it doesn't take a long look at history to realise that it was even darker in the past. Even ignorin

While I love to be a gloomy asshole as much as anyone else, it doesn't take a long look at history to realise that it was even darker in the past. Even ignoring millions of lives and years of total war in the 40s, the world went completely batshit during the Cold War and was right on the edge of killing virtually everyone in Earth, more than once, amid political madness everywhere. And before that, politics and geopolitics was completely unhinged. While weapons maybe have been limited to ships and flintlocks, what countries got up to was not really less fucked up than Ukraine is today. In the context of that, a douchebag loudmouth president and a turf war in Eastern Europe aren't particularly cataclysmic. I'm pretty sure a lot of the gloom is just "fast media" amplifying things and cycling news into a vortex within a few hours and hammering it relentlessly. For most of history, you heard about the state of things once a day at most, in a medium quite detached from your usual life (newspaper, radio or TV, and before that days or weeks could pass). Now, it's mainlined into your brain 24/7 though communication devices that are all but as pervasive as implants, combined with literally decades of research into how to make it as addictive as possible, as well as being able to also sneak it through what used to be personal communications (i.e. social media). Though, that said, I'm not at all sure climate change isn't a new level of "uh oh", but unpicking it from the background static of breathlessness is pretty hard.