Things just aren't that bad and probably won't be

This is no way to encourage more paying subscribers

The tree is only pretending to be something from Alien

The preamble:

Meditation this morning. I’m in a hard-backed chair, facing outside. Eyes closed. Ten minutes of Sam (Harris - his Waking Up app) guiding the user to notice. It’s not about relaxation or changing anything. Just awareness. The point is that the more aware you are of your disposition, the less likely you are to be jerked around by aspects of yourself that are always there but which shouldn’t surreptitiously in control.

He’s saying something about there being nothing to think about for the next 10 minutes ... no planning ... no pondering things that need doing etc

A silent inner chuckle from me as I give myself a good listening to, while my mind is supposed to be empty.

In no particular order, the procession of impressions and thoughts is relentless.

• Can’t wait to try that new bread.

• Feeling quite fresh. Maybe I slept well.

• No idea what to cook tonight. I’ve got bacon that needs using.

• The garden is a state.

• Glad I ditched Napster and went with Qobuz.

• I need to get laid.

• Hope P and Youna are making good progress (they’re driving home from this)

• Glad I got the pellet burner.

• The pellet burner is quieter than expected.

• Where shall I walk this afternoon?

• Hungry.

• That 14% stout last night was amazing.

• It’s fine that it’s raining.

• The tarp on that roof looks secure.

• What did Sam just say?

It looks worse written down that is was to experience the procession of thoughts. This mind is rarely empty, except when I’m in the flow of something. Or sometimes indulging my habit of sitting in the meadow after nightfall to absorb whatever is in the air.

The point:

Notably, one thought was absent. It’s a very popular thought, based on how often I see and hear it expressed.

The world is in a terrible state.

This thought never arises because I think it’s bullshit.

And yet, people are miserable all the time about ‘the state of the world’. They always think it’s going in the wrong direction. Apparently away from some previous better state. Only the other day someone was telling me that a friend had started up, over drinks, about how depressed they are about the state of the world and - inevitably - Trump immediately came up. Like me, she pushes back on this too, and is met with a kind of blankness.

Like a social rule was just broken. You don’t want to talk about how terrible Trump is.

It’s as if there is a rule among a certain cosmopolitan middle class that you can’t be happy while ever there is any ‘non-progressive’ energy in the political or cultural ether of the anglophone world.

I have no idea if this is sincere or performative.

If it’s sincere I feel sorry for people who can’t even get a tiny lift in spirits from the Gaza ceasefire only because it was driven into existence by Oafish Orange Man’s talent for the brute willing of his alternative facts into some version of reality.

Having spent the entire Gaza war feeling little to no sympathy for a culture that would eradicate all Jews in the region and nothing but contempt for the academic just-so story creators of post-colonial morality tales who carry water for the savages of Hamas, I was somewhat surprised at how much relief I felt that the bulk of the killing is at least temporarily over.

I must still be quite human.

But almost no one in my orbit is happy, because Trump is Bad and that’s all there is to it. He is crudely enriching himself, you see. His bribe price - or bride price - is always involved somewhere. There has to be something in it for The Donald and his family. Even though his personal antipathy to violence is well enough documented (while the exquisitely cultured Obama pretended to be a peacenik while overseeing untold killings of America’s enemies) he’s still lazily labelled a ‘fascist’.

I’m fascinated by the Trumpian approach, which boils down to doux commerce. Even if it involves enriching himself outside of all previous presidential norms. That wild idea he floated of turning the Gaza strip into a resort wasn’t as stupid as everyone wanted it to be. Especially given that the Palestinian ‘cause’ is entirely focused on ‘liberation’ rather than what kind of nation they could be.

So, in a certain culture, you can’t just smile at his childlike desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize and be happy that he lied and bullied Hamas and Netanyahu into mostly not fucking with each other in the way they have for the previous two years. To fit in with polite society you have to look past any of his achievements and focus entirely on all the norm-busting ways he has.

You can’t hang out with any ‘nice people’ and dare to suggest that climate change won’t be the global catastrophe that they seem to actively want it to be. Because then you’ll be called a ‘denier’, no matter how nuanced your view.

Things have got to be terrible and everyone has to know that you feel bad about it all. They even built the Bluesky platform especially to wallow in this vibe.

Well, I don’t. For all the things that are regrettable in the world, I’m still glad to be living in 2025 with so many fewer people dying in wars, famines and the rest of us no longer suffering from the terrible hot beverages, rubbish white goods and unreliable technology that plagued every other time.

It’s as if being unhappy and anxious is an individual duty. That you can’t be at ease in life as long as anyone is worse off than you. It’s all so puritanically Christian, but without any of the good bits like a beautiful afterlife and being loved in a fundamental way by something bigger than you.

No, I’m not suckering for it. My health will fail in due course and other awful things will befall me and the people I love, because that’s life, but I’m not wasting my remaining time with anxiety, anger, frustration and disapproval that the Gaza ceasefire was forced into happening by an uber capitalist who cheats at golf.

I predict that Substack has a bright future because ... catastrophising

Catastrophising is popular and sells well on Substack. That’s why you might have been fed the false impression that Britain is poised on the brink of civil war. People love that stuff.

Long ago I wrote about an article I can’t find now. Written by a prominent American conservative in the early 60s (if memory serves) it was all about the imminent collapse of civilised society due to liberal values. Nothing of the sort ever happened and more or less the same article is published every day by anxious conservatives.

Let’s not pick on the right. The leftish is at least as bad.

But making catastrophic claims is useful in politics and now a lot more in science, where such things tend to be PR-driven. These claims’ relationship with reality play second fiddle to their utility as tools for signalling to peers, rallying people to a cause like ‘fighting’ climate change, getting research funding or selling books, newspaper, magazine and Substack articles.

Here’s where things aren’t just supposed to be bad. You’re expected to agree that they’re getting worse. So terrible predictions are made. One of my favourites is that Trump will end democracy in the US so that he can have another term in office. Lol.

Prophecy is one of the oldest rhetorical tricks in the book for attention and status-seeking.

When a doom-laden prediction doesn’t come true, the trick is just to keep ‘em coming. The market will see to the rewards.

It’s a tradition as old as humanity.

Remember when Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb? We were going to run out of food because of too many people and then human ingenuity magically increased production and it’s now mostly wars that cause starvation. Even the deleterious effects of climate change are now proven to be mostly mitigated by improvements in that field, apart from maybe in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yes, problems exist and it will obviously be better to work on them. But there is no sign of catastrophe.

China hasn’t collapsed, either. It was going to, said lots of pointy-headed types, and then it didn’t.

I can feel the intakes of breath from here. The accusations of Pollyannaish naivety.

Go right ahead and feel worried, if that’s right for you. I’ll need better reasons to be depressed about the times we live in.

Let’s establish some rules though. If you aren’t miserable about the many awful things that still go on, I won’t assume that you think they’re fine. The suggestion here isn’t that everything is great. It’s that everything isn’t shit. Or, maybe the stronger claim that things are mostly quite good. All messy and bumbling, with lots of sub-optimal things like the Ukraine war dragging on and Hamas going back to their old habit of mostly killing Palestinians they don’t like and myriad other issues, but still the world isn’t ending.

When you shoot the social breeze with someone who launches into the ‘ain’t it awful‘ game it’s probably easiest to just go along with it. That’s simpler than banging on about all the evidence that complexity, adaptation and innovation are under-appreciated for forestalling collapses and foiling the direst predictions.

Human ingenuity knows no bounds in creating fears of catastrophe, but also averting it. Those Covid vaccines were an astonishing achievement. But just as climate doomerism is beginning to dial back a bit we now have the AI will kill us all and must therefore be stopped movement.

Names are now being made in this field, with wild prophecies that are really just variations on the paperclip maximiser thought experiment. There’s even a popular podcast called ‘The Last Invention‘ because, you see, AI will take over and that will be it. Our last invention will destroy us.

No one who has adopted this miserable outlook will be swayed by your suggestion that the leaps from massively disruptive (with gains and losses in an economic and cultural sense) to catastrophic are unlikely. Or that it’s actually hard for robots to gain total control of all resources while under the beady eye of the most successful species on Earth and that immunity to shutdown if things really do go badly wrong is probably impossible for even a ‘thinking’ machine to achieve.

Let alone the obvious possibility that AI might plateau anyway, without ever becoming agentic in any meaningful sense. More disappointing things have happened. I once thought we’d all have flying cars by now, with magnetic fields preventing crashes, but we plateaued and I just go around in a Peugeot 3008 with an oil consumption problem.

I’m sorry not sorry for writing a post against the miserable zeitgeist. You could say that I’m a catastrophe sceptic. But really I’m just fed up with all the moaning.