Don’t lose perspective. This is still the best time to be alive. – Orange County Register

Looking around at the state of the world and society, it’s quite easy to fall into a sense that everything is falling apart. The recent pandemic, wars in Myanmar, Israel, and Ukraine, global warming, mass shootings, and rising political polarization. 

Despite such challenges, when put into historical context, this appears to be the very best time to be a human. 

The past was much more violent than it is today. Wars, famine, genocide, and other atrocities are much less common. Global homicide rates have fallen considerably over the centuries, but even more substantially in the last three decades. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, global homicide rates have fallen 17% in just the last 30 years.

Over the past couple of centuries, more nations have moved away from autocracy toward democracy. While almost all governments in the world 200 years ago were closed autocracies, about 40% of the countries in the world today are liberal democracies or electoral democracies, with just 17% classified as closed autocracies today, according to Our World in Data. 

Life expectancy is at an all time high, global poverty is a fraction of what it was just a century ago and ordinary people have access to many beautiful and interesting places within hours and not months. 

Life is so good now that our New Year’s resolutions are to stop eating so much food or to cut back on time spent binging TV shows. It’s telling that a major challenge for many nowadays is to refrain from overindulging. This is not to say that there aren’t millions who suffer deep injustices or face dire circumstances. This is only to say that if you had to choose an era in human history to live, and you didn’t know who in society you would be, there should be little doubt that you should choose today.

For a very long time now, the world has been undergoing changes to become increasingly moral. Moral progress is apparent across history and this has happened despite there having been heavy resistance to that progress. Humanity as a whole has moved away from barbarisms like slavery even though it may have been economically beneficial to continue the practice. The world has moved towards granting everyone equal rights, such as extending the right to vote to women and minority groups. More and more countries have legalized gay marriage despite objection from significant portions of the population. 

Now more than ever before, Western society as a whole is cognizant of its moral failings, particularly in its treatment of minority groups. The MeToo and BLM movements happened precisely because humanity is increasingly unwilling to look away from injustices.

So why does it feel so much like everything is going wrong? A simplistic analysis would not do these complex matters justice, but an obvious culprit is the immediate availability of vast amounts of information. Many things are in fact still going wrong and we now have unprecedented access to those happenings. You can now learn about mines collapsing on some poor workers half a world away. As you should know by now, it is in the best interest of the media to keep you trembling. 

Pair this with the fact that we are disposed to several cognitive biases that work to trap us in a state of panic. The salience bias is the cognitive tendency to focus on stimuli that are more visible. If all you’re consuming every day is information about everything wrong in the world, it’s understandable that so many of us can’t help but form the belief that society is in decline. We see what is immediately in front of us, not general socioeconomic trends across time.