Photo: Lex Kryuchin (Shutterstock)
According to a recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center, only 37% of Americans think life is better now than it was 50 years ago, and that survey was conducted five years ago. I understand why someone would feel like things are getting worse, but by most measures of the goodness or badness of things in general, life is getting better—as long as you pull the focus back more than a few years.
We are an idealistic people, and we’re not very good at taking the long view. Instead, we tend to measure our current situation against an ideal as opposed to measuring it against the past. We’ve also made such steady progress over the last centuries that any stall or downturn can seem like a larger backslide than it would seem in the broader context.
While I’m not discounting the major challenges facing our nation and the world, it doesn’t hurt to try to get some perspective by considering all the things—both big and small—that we mostly don’t have to worry about anymore. Here are 11 of them, but there are thousands more.
