Reasons to be hopeful: Life is getting better for most of us

I tend toward pessimism, I freely admit it. It's either an aspect of my personality, or a character flaw, depending on how I look at it. (I tend toward the latter view.) I'm trying to change that, in view of my faith and in view of the reality of the world, too, when properly viewed.

Matt Ridley wrote a great essay on HuffingtonPost.com getting to the heart of this very conundrum: Why is it that there are so many pessimists predicting a dire, hopeless future when the world is actually improving by every reasonable measure? Ridley has a few ideas:

I now see at firsthand how I avoided hearing any good news when I was young. Where are the pressure groups that have an interest in telling the good news? They do not exist. By contrast, the behemoths of bad news, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year and doom is their best fund-raiser. Where is the news media's interest in checking out how pessimists' predictions panned out before? There is none. By my count, Lester Brown has now predicted a turning point in the rise of agricultural yields six times since 1974, and been wrong each time. Paul Ehrlich has been predicting mass starvation and mass cancer for 40 years. He still predicts that `the world is coming to a turning point'.

I think Ridley's onto something here: Follow the money. Nobody raises funds by claiming that the problem they aim to solve is actually getting solved. No, it's dire predictions of imminent doom—unless you send money NOW. That's not to say that there aren't very worthy causes worthy of our support, and in many cases these organizations addressing these causes are the very ones imbibing at the downer bar to raise funds. They spend a lot of money, so they have to raise a lot of money. Understood.

But still, it's a healthy bromide—and it feels good going down, believe me—that mixes a healthy skepticism of pessimism along with an optimistic outlook rooted in facts. For all our carping about the excesses of the modern world, who among us wants to go back to a time of less sanitation? How unhappy would you be about unprocessed food if you struggled to raise enough food to feed your family? How much would global warming suck if you were alive during the Little Ice Age, when food was scarce and life was amazingly harsh? I could go on, but the idea is clear enough.

Nothing new about this dynamic, either, as Ridley notes:

I got back to 1830 and still the sentiment was being used. In fact, the poet and historian Thomas Macaulay was already sick of it then: `We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason.' He continued: `On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us.'

Admittedly, I'm as guilty as anyone. I tend to narrow my focus too much, in part because my depression can be so daunting at times. That's no excuse, but it is an explanation that makes sense; when my depression is treated adequately (as it seems to be now), I become more hopeful, reminded by my faith in Christ that I have every reason to hope no matter life's circumstances. (On that note, though, it doesn't hurt that I've recently fallen in love, and that definitely ups the hope factor.)

So, I invite all you fellow pessimists to drink in a little optimism and broaden the scope of what you see. Doesn't mean that problems don't abound, that horrors still exist; does mean that things have gotten much better, sometimes fitfully, and in spite of the predictions of imminent doom, things are generally better now than they ever have been. The future? A lot brighter than I had imagined. And that feels damned good.