Progress
The opening of my talk Of Time And The Web deals with our collective negativity bias. The general consensus is that the world has become worse. Crime. Inequality. Poverty. Pollution. Most people think these things are heading in the wrong direction.
But they’re not. Every year the world gets better and better. But it’s happening gradually. Like I said:
If something changes gradually, we don’t notice it. We literally exhibit something called change blindness.
But we are hard-wired to notice sudden changes. We pay attention to moments of change.
“Where were you when JFK was assassinated?”
“Where were you on September 11th?”
Nobody is ever going to ask “where were you when smallpox was eradicated?”
I know it might seem obscene to suggest that the world is getting better given the horrific situation in Gaza and the ongoing quagmire in Ukraine. But the very fact that the world is united in outrage is testament to how far we’ve come.
I try to balance my news intake with more positive stories of progress. Reasons to Be Cheerful is one good source:
We tell stories that reveal that there are, in fact, a surprising number of reasons to feel cheerful. Many of these reasons come in the form of smart, proven, replicable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Through sharp reporting, our stories balance a sense of healthy optimism with journalistic rigor, and find cause for hope. We are part magazine, part therapy session, part blueprint for a better world.
Most news outlets don’t operate that way. If it bleeds, it leads.
Even if you’re not actively tracking positive news on a daily or weekly basis, the end of the year feels like a suitable time to step back and take note of our collective progress.
Future Crunch has 66 Good News Stories You Didn’t Hear About in 2023:
The American journalist Krista Tippett says that we’re all fluent enough by now in the language of catastrophe and dysfunction, and what’s needed are more of what she calls ‘generative narratives.’ This year, we found over 2,000 of those kinds of stories, and shared them with tens of thousands of readers in a weekly email. Not dog-on-a-surfboard, baby-survives-a-tornado stories, but genuine, world changing stuff about how millions of lives are improving, about human rights victories, diseases being eliminated, falling emissions, how vast swathes of our planet are being protected and how entire species have been saved.
The Progress Network reports that something good happened every week of 2023:
Despite the wars, emergencies, and crises of 2023, the year was full of substantive good news.
Positive.news has its own round-up. What went right in 2023: the top 25 good news stories of the year:
The ‘golden age of medicine’ arrived, animals came back from the brink, the renewables juggernaut gathered pace, climate reparations became reality and scientists showed how to slow ageing, plus more good news.
On the topic of climate change, the BBC has nine breakthroughs for climate and nature in 2023 you may have missed:
Record-setting spending on clean energy in the US. A clean energy milestone in the world’s power sector. A surge in lawsuits against polluters. A treaty for the oceans 40 years in the making.
This year has seen some remarkable steps forward in tackling the nature and climate crises.
That’s the kind of reporting we need more of. As Kate Marvel wrote in the New York Times, “I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore.”:
In the last decade, the cost of wind energy has declined by 70 percent and solar has declined 90 percent. Renewables now make up 80 percent of new electricity generation capacity. Our country’s greenhouse gas emissions are falling, even as our G.D.P. and population grow.
There’s a pernicious myth that a crisis mindset is necessary to drive change. I think that might be true for short-term emergencies, but it’s counter-productive for long-term problems.
Speaking for myself, I am far more likely to take action if I can see that progress has already been made, and that my actions won’t be pointless. Constant doomerism isn’t just lazy, it’s demotivational. See my excoriating words when reviewing Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife:
Instead of asking what the future might actually be like, it instead asks “what’s the absolute worst that could happen?” Frankly, it’s a cop-out.
As we head in 2024 it’s worth taking stock of the big-picture improvements we’ve collectively made so that we can continue the work.
If the news headlines continue to get you down, take some time to browse around Our World In Data.
And if you find yourself instinctively rejecting all these reports of progress, ask yourself why that might be. As I said in my talk:
We have this phrase: “sounds too good to be true.”
But we don’t have this phrase: “sounds too bad to be true.”