Things have gotten better and progress has been made from times past, it just seems worse now because we have more access to information. We’ve come far, and have further to go!
Jesus Christ this thread. The technicalities aren’t the point. You are allowed to find happiness where you can in an imperfect world that contains suffering. It doesn’t mean you’ll be complacent to injustice. Fighting against injustice can be done without thinking the world is hopeless dogshit. There’s satisfaction that can be justifiably had, through means other than smug superiority at knowing all the depressing truths of the world, or the sympathy of others for your problems. We feed ourselves so much rage and sadness via the internet, can we not have a palate-cleanser like this without chewing it up and spitting it out, and then going back to gorging on more?
The thingeis: the world is getting less free and inequality has been constantly rising in the last decades.
This Steven Pinker BS is advertising complacency, while we should agitate people to fight for a better world.
If you want to be optimistic, look around for the average kindness of everyday live inside communities. The FOSS community, unions, mutual aid in neighborhoods etc. This would lift you up and point in the direction where things could get better.
Hey OP, this is a book about just that: https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814
This is a website that goes along with it and has updated stats: https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/32-improvements/
Basically everything is getting better, despite public opinion to the contrary. The one thing (as this thread is harping on) is climate change, and ya, that’s big, but it is good to acknowledge that most other things are changing for the better in most ways.
In the US every single one of those indicators is going the other way. It’s only by looking globally that you can say that.
Be happy the silent generation won some serious gains that the boomers, X, and millennials are steadily eroding for profit?
No thanks. That’s called complacency.
Celebrating and taking pride in what has been achieved is part of what motivates people to defend it. Doomposting online does nothing to motivate people and merely depresses them.
Every inch of progress has been won through a combination of a rhetoric of hope for what could be achieved, and a recognition of the shortcomings of the current system. Having the former without the latter leads to complacency, but having the latter without the former leads to apathy and despair.
Considering that most progress in the last few hundred years has been fought for (sometimes violently), like weekends, the 8 hour day, etc. kinda proves you wrong.
