Maybe it’s my age, but it seems increasingly difficult to be sanguine about, well…pretty much anything, really. Even my wife, who’s often been (somewhat) unfairly maligned as a Pollyanna, has been getting in on the curmudgeon action lately.
So when David Walsh, a University of Virginia postdoctoral fellow, asked his Twitter followers what has gotten “materially better” in America over the last twenty years, the responses provide “a nice reminder that a lot of stuff really has been getting better over the past few decades and American society isn’t really the perpetual motion fail machine many people make it out to be.”
Similarly, back in April, HumanProgress.org marked “the beginning of #78DaysOfProgress, a thread that will outline seventy-eight different ways the world is getting better.” Here’s the thread in its entirety.
I suppose this is all cause for hope. But then, if organizations and individuals feel compelled to convince us that, despite what seems patently obvious, things are actually ducky, I’m not so sure that’s a good sign.
