I am, at times, vocal in my frustration with the way things are. But the thing to keep in mind is that this is due in large part due to the gulf between the way things are, and the way things could be if we collectively made different choices.
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Nostalgia's an easy trap for many to fall into, but things are so much better now in so many ways than they were even 40 years ago, let alone 400 years ago. A lot of formerly death-sentence diseases are now managed chronic conditions. The percentage of people in extreme poverty is way down.
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Crime rates are far lower than they were. Though there's still work to be done, society is more accepting of a range of lives than it used to be. We've actually fixed some environmental problems, like acid rain. There is a lot that's been good.
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But our advances have not been even. The huge increase in productivity hasn't resulted in people working fewer hours and having more leisure time. Wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of the few, and a larger share of people are finding everything more precarious than before.
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Social progress has come in spurts, and while movement has happened on a lot of fronts, it's often far short of what proponents either expected or hoped for.
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The difference between what you end up with, and what you expected to have? That's in many senses where grief comes from. To risk being trite: Few 70 year olds are grieving the death of their grandparents, even if those grandparents were wonderful and beloved.
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It might seem counterintuitive, but I think it takes a certain amount of optimism to even think things could be better. To challenge the fatalism that the way things are is inevitable.
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There are some bad things which just are. Even if humans hadn't been messing with the global environment, disasters like hurricanes and wildfires and all the rest would still happen. People would contract illnesses, and sometimes treatments wouldn't work. Our choices can't undo all of those.
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But our choices could -- and still can -- mitigate those harms. The US doesn't *have* to spend more on its military than the next 10 largest spending countries combined. We don't *need* to tie health care to paid work of 37+ hours per week. These are choices, and we can change them.
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