I would hazard to say that PFAs and microplastics are safer than lead and mercury but less safe than not having them at all, but only with the caveat that I bel

I would hazard to say that PFAs and microplastics are safer than lead and mercury but less safe than not having them at all, but only with the caveat that I believe there's got to be some sort of Zeno's Paradox correlation with environmental human health and safety. To wit: People used to do all sorts of self-harming things not knowing any better and now we do fewer of them. The Romans used to sweeten their wines with powdered lead. The ancient Chinese alchemists used to make elixirs of immortality out of mercury compounds and feed them to their wealthy. I'm not saying things are good now and that we shouldn't push for them to be better, not by any means. Rather I am saying that as we take further steps towards optimal human health, aligning our common environmental encounters with our biology, we should remember that the effort people have put in to get us this far is only going to take us half as far the next time, and half again the time after. And that is all well and good, progress is progress, right? However, does it not seem like the smaller the flaw we find the more we get upset about it? I believe this phenomenon is caused by a continuing delusion that we were once ever perfect, that we ever lived in harmony with nature, that there is some paradisian SI Garden of Eden unit we can measure our present environment against, and that the current state of events is the face of our fall from grace and must be destroyed like the monster it is. I believe the truth is things have never been better in hundreds of ways, and they're going to keep getting better as we repent of our past mistakes and learn more about what mistakes we are still currently making, and that the world 25 years from now will be as different a world as the world of today is to the world of 1999.