> Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it
I personally believe this is influenced by media consumption. I think “Everything is terrible” or “horrible thing happened” headlines are much more likely to get clicks than “world continues to gradually improve” headlines. Combine that with how consistently marketable outrage seems to be to just about everybody, and you end up with a world full of signals that everything is bad.
We are experiencing a global pollution event that has never been seen before. We are in the midst of potentially unprecedented mass extinction in modern times.
Can you consider the possibility that some things can improve while other things can get worse? That the cost of improvement in some areas, technological or the economy, will be a trade off in others like our enviroment?
Can you consider that as technology increases, so does the overall impact of humanity, so does the possibility of an extinction event. That there are more nuclear weapons today than ever before and the knowledge of this technology will only increase in the future.
I find your comment incredibly naive in its contrarianism. Oh sure, the media wants to scare you but that doesn't mean problems don't exist. This idea that everything always gets better with time is a ridiculous bias. The Dark Ages happened and it can come again. Progress is not a guarantee.
This kind of catastrophizing is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. I also think it’s quite arrogant of you to frame my perspective as naive.
You’ve made a single point about climate change, and chose to only focus on the worst way you could possibly interpret everything, including your own speculations about events that you think will occur. On the same topic you could also make points about renewable technologies constantly improving, and renewable adoption in the market. But the perspective you’ve put forward is that everything is all bad, all the time, and always getting worse. The reality is quite far from what you’ve characterised, and I think that one of the more concerning implications of this point of view is that good things shouldn’t be worthy of attention if bad things also exist.
I personally believe this is influenced by media consumption. I think “Everything is terrible” or “horrible thing happened” headlines are much more likely to get clicks than “world continues to gradually improve” headlines. Combine that with how consistently marketable outrage seems to be to just about everybody, and you end up with a world full of signals that everything is bad.