The other day, I was sitting at a table with 4 generations present, including the Silent Generation (born 1928 – 1945), myself, a Baby Boomer (born 1946 – 1964), A Gen X (born 1965 – 1980) and two Millennials (born 1981 – 1996). Two were great grandparents, two were grandparents and two were parents.

The conversation turned, as it often does, to the state of the world today. One of the great grandparents said, “I worry about the world we’re passing along. I don’t think the world has ever been this bad.” One of the Millennial parents responded, “I don’t think the world is any worse, it’s just different.”

Emotionally, I can see both sides. I sometimes wonder myself, is the world getting worse or is it just different? So I decided to put my emotions aside and tried to look at this as objectively as I could.

First, let’s look at existential angst, generation by generation, starting at the turn of the last century. Just how bad was the world when each of these generations were growing up?

The Greatest Generation (1900 – 1927) – Faced the First World War and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic.

The Silent Generation (1928 – 1945) – Faced the Great Depression, the Second World War, Mass Genocide and the Dawn of the possibility of Nuclear Annihilation

The Baby Boomers (1946 – 1964) – Nuclear Threats, the Cold War, Korean and Vietnam Wars

Generation X (1965 – 1980) – Inflation, Oil Crisis, HIV/AIDS, Renewed Nuclear Tension and the start of Terrorism.

Millennials (1981 – 1996) – Global Terrorism, the Beginnings of Climate Concern, Financial Crises.

I think it’s fair to say that each generation has had their fare share of cataclysmic things to worry about. But it’s also true that – by many objective measures – the world is a better place than it’s ever been before. In 1940, more than half the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today, that has dropped to about 10%. Infant mortality rates have declined by about 90% over that same 86-year stretch. And, in that same time, our average life expectancy has increased by over 16 years.

Even with all those positive trends, I don’t want to be naïve about the problems we face today. I also have a broad streak of pessimism running through me. But, as Swedish physician and academic Hans Rosling said in his 2018 book Factfulness, “When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems.”

So, why do things seem so much worse now? Again, if we look at the human need to worry about stuff, it’s instructive to see how each generation viewed existential threats. Because it turns out that it might not be the degree of threat that has changed. Maybe it’s the way we learn about and worry about those threats.

If you look at the way humans have historically worried about things up until the middle of the last century, our circle of concern was centered around our own families: would our children survive to adulthood, would our husbands and fathers return from war, would we have enough to eat through the winter? Our circles were small because our worlds were small. What we worried about was what immediately impacted us where we lived.

But things changed with the Second World War. Suddenly, we started hearing about frightening things from around the world. It wasn’t so much that the threats got bigger, but mass media made every worrisome thing in the world our own personal worry.

The biggest contributor to existential anxiety is to gain knowledge of worrying things without being able to do anything about them. Awareness of threats without agency is incredibly debilitating for humans. It triggers something called the smoke alarm principle.

We have evolved to be sensitive to threats. But our evolutionary landscape presupposed we could respond to these threats – through either fight or flight. The costs to investigate a threat – like a buzzing smoke detector – are outweighed by the benefit of responding that threat – preventing a housefire. This threat detection mechanism has been built to withstand a few false alarms. Burning toast that sets off a smoke alarm may be a little irritating, but it’s not going to cause us to throw the alarm away. But a smoke alarm that is constantly buzzing creates chronic anxiety, especially when it’s warning us about things we can’t do anything about.

There’s yet another cognitive quirk that leads us to catastrophize the world – called availability bias. We use information that is top of mind, such as what we’ve just read on our social media feed or seen in a news alert pop up – and apply it generally as representative of the state of the world. Because we are constantly bombarded by negativity, it’s only human to assume everything is bad, even if, as Rosling told us, statistics paint a different picture.

So, after this non-emotional analysis, I came to this conclusion: are things worse now than ever before? No. In fact, the opposite may be true. But for media owners, there’s no profitability in good news.

That said, we’re still a long way from good, and we should never stop aiming for that. As Mr. Rosling also tried to tell us, “Things can be both bad and better.”