On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”
Most of what you read on the news and social media would have you convinced that civilization is declining or collapsing.  If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy).<p>What does this mean?  Why the difference between the measurable state of the world and the doomer discourse?  I think its rooted in two things.<p>The first reason is that both social media and news media are monetized by your attention, and attention is far higher when things are presented as terrible than when things are presented as good.  Bad news goes viral far better than good news.<p>The second reason is that being highly online is correlated with depression.  The people who are most likely to be spending their time posting online are more likely to be depressed and lose perspective about the world around them.<p>What&#x27;s the solution?  I don&#x27;t know for sure but I think a good first step is to limit the time you spend consuming news media and social media, and instead spend time offline living life.  What&#x27;s the point of a constant stream of information if it leads to inaccurate perceptions of the world?