Hello discoverers!

When the collective mood is dark and every headline seems to pile it on, the optimists love to wheel out the charts: we’ve never been healthier, wealthier, safer, look at the data! But that comfort evaporates the moment you open the news and see that another country just joined the arms race or another month was added to the record books for heat.

My default setting leans pessimistic (like a proper German) but zooming out and putting our current anxieties in historical context can be a useful exercise, particularly now, when every piece of media wants to hijack our basic threat-response systems.

Oliver Burkeman’s latest newsletter issue makes a great case for keeping a healthy perspective:

“The truth is that we’re probably living through times that future historians will think of as broadly normal. Dangerous and consequential, yes, but still normal.”

The reason this is so hard to accept, he argues, comes down to what has been labelled as ‘temporal chauvinism’:

“The feeling that the time you’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever – simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience.”

Burkeman points to centuries of failed apocalypse predictions – from astrologers to religious leaders – and notes:

“There wasn’t some little part of their brains that was thinking ‘I know I’m being superstitious here – it’ll be different in the future, when people aren’t so ignorant!’ As far as they knew, they were in possession of the facts; they surely felt just as secure in their convictions as any AI thought leader today.”

He argues that much of today’s doomerism is a coping mechanism:

“Human existence is intrinsically unsafe and insecure, all the time. Anything could happen at any moment, the future is unknowable, one day you’ll die, and some people end up having vastly more traumatic encounters with these realities than others. Against this backdrop, AI doomerism starts to look like a coping mechanism for dealing with existential anxiety.”

This zooming out connects nicely with something Yuval Noah Harari points out on the Ezra Klein podcast. Harari offers a quick test for whether you’re a liberal: do you believe people should choose their own government, their own profession, their own religion, and their own spouse? If you say yes to all four, congratulations, you’re a liberal. And so are the vast majority of people across the political spectrum today, including most people who’d never call themselves that.

His point is that for most of human history, none of those four things were up for debate, let alone agreement. Today they are, and most of us land in the same place, which means the actual ideological gap is narrower than it’s ever been, even as everyone keeps telling us that we’ve never been more divided.

Optimism always comes with a risk. Lean too hard into ‘it’s all fine’ and you risk sapping the urgency that actually gets things done. Movements for change need momentum and action – they don’t just come about naturally.

But there’s an equally seductive trap on the other side – the doom spiral that feels like German seriousness but is really just another excuse to check out.

Things are bad, some of them are legitimately dangerous, and also, this is roughly what being alive has always felt like. The difficult trick is holding onto both at once: staying angry enough to act, without convincing yourself the sky is permanently falling.

And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai