I tend to be known for what more pessimistic people would call “wearing rose colored glasses”. I’m a big fan of Steven Pinker and his books and articles about how much better things are than they used to be, and similarly the charts and graphs at Our World in Data.
So it’s very on brand for me to say that I see all the posts and tweets about how awful 2020 is and kind of instinctively have a contrarian take that we are fortunate to live through such challenging but also historic times. No one is ever going to ask their grandparents what it was like to live through the 1990s, except perhaps as a mildly curious notion of culturally understanding the ennui of rising prosperity and “the end of history”.
But this year is likely to rank up there with Watergate and the Great Depression combined, unless something so off the deep end happens in 10 or 20 years as to make this period seem insignificant by comparison (let’s hope not). Yet for most people it’s not actually as tough to live through as the Great Depression, and it’s certainly not as difficult as the world wars (the first of which coincided with an even worse pandemic, not to mention severe violations of civil liberties in the Palmer raids and a surge in KKK membership). So when you’re tempted to bemoan having to live through all this, remember that the upside is that we get to “live in interesting times”!