I’ve got a career I like, a wife and kids I love, and a city I enjoy. I’m also sharing a planet full of a species that has endured and conquered plagues, slave

I’ve got a career I like, a wife and kids I love, and a city I enjoy. I’m also sharing a planet full of a species that has endured and conquered plagues, slavery, centuries of war, and the threat of nuclear war, amongst other hardships. Things have been much worse and we will continue to improve. Check out the book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know for a counter to your doomscrolling. So why do so many smart people wrongly believe that, all things considered, the world is getting worse? Way back in 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo, observed, "There is a basic asymmetry in life between the positive, which is difficult and takes time, and the negative, which is much easier and takes less time—compare the amount of time needed to bring up and socialize an adult person and the amount of time needed to kill him in an accident, the amount of time needed to build a house and to destroy it in a fire, to make an airplane and to crash it, and so on."' News is bad news; steady progress is not news.