Why does it feel like everything is getting worse?

And why it's actually not.

A bee on my allotment.

I often can’t help but feel like everything is getting actively worse.

Learning about the various crises we face seems to unlock a pandora’s box of shit, but even putting catastrophic climate change, wars, and genocide aside, it seems clear that as a species we’re not on the up.

In Western cultures—and cultures beguiled by us—our health is getting worse. Chronic illness is rising. We’re sadder, lonelier, and more depressed than ever before.

Communities are non-existent. Families live in isolation. Two-income individuals struggle to buy a starter home. Healthcare is eye-wateringly expensive or waitlists are months and years long. Everyone is addicted to a screen.

Even just stuff seems to be worse. Clothes are worse quality and the things we buy are mostly low-quality tat. It even feels like the majority of TV shows, movies, and video games are low-effort cash grabs.

Hell, even the internet, the place that promised democratised access to unlimited knowledge, is dying too.

We walk a weird line in our industrial growth society. We are fed bad news by our media cycles pretty much 24/7, with constant updates on new horrors, new wars, new destruction.

However, we are still encouraged–expected–to wholeheartedly believe that life is getting better overall. That humanity is on a path of progress, and we’re living a life that is richer, healthier, convenient-er than ever before.

It’s this illusion of progress, especially in the Western world, we’ve been spoon-fed our entire lives. Technology has helped us eliminate human suffering, reduce famines, cure diseases, connected us and create more conveniences.

Whilst this statement is technically true, blindly believing our progress allows us to look away from how much more destruction we have caused.

You know, the fact our intense rates of consumerism are ruining the planet, we’re on track for irreversible climate change, people are statistically more depressed, lonely, and anxious, and suicide rates are continuing to grow. Or how our intense need to spread Western ideology to other countries across the world has wiped out traditional cultures and indigenous populations. How our ‘progress’ has created an innumerable amount of losses of natural landscapes, knowledge, culture, wisdom, communities, and skill sets.

This quote from Henry Miller¹ sums up my feelings on this topic well: "We devise astounding means of communication, but do we communicate with one another? We move our bodies to and fro at incredible speeds, but do we really leave the spot we started from? Mentally, morally, spiritually, we are fettered. What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?"

I think breaking away from this progress myth and understanding how good things have also caused a lot of bad things is essential to making sense of the various crises we find ourselves in.

Yet we can also turn this around, seeing how dangerous it is to believe that everything about the way we live is currently wrong or out of balance. That there was a certain point in history that was 'right' and we've strayed away from it and need to go back.

Whether you’re part of the primitivists who think we need to go back as far as pre-agricultural, hunter/gatherer societies, or you’re more into tradwife idealism and yearning for the 1940s. There was never a ‘right way’ humanity lived which we need to return to.

Okay–but I thought this article was about how things aren’t actively getting worse? We’re getting there.

Well, humans absolutely love to focus on the negatives–I mean, we’re hardwired this way for evolutionary purposes–and we’ve been doing it for a long time. History shows us we love to believe every turn of a century is going to bring doom and gloom.

In a great article from

The Green Fix

, author Cass pointed out we've thought the world was ending since, basically, forever. She writes ‘I’ve been writing about the climate crisis for nearly six years and one thing I notice is that in some ways, the news hasn’t changed much since the scribal writings of the Doomsday visions of 8th century monks. The end of the world is always imminent and society is always, apparently, in a state of decay and moral degradation. […] Across the political spectrum, people take to their opinion columns to let me know that the end is nigh. Again.’

This article from Our World In Data explains this ‘everything is great, no wait everything is shit’ conflict well: "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time."

The author Max Roser tells us that our discussion too often focuses on the first statement, how everything seems to be awful–and getting worse–all the time. Alternatively, if we focus too heavily on the positive statement, 'the world is better', dripping in the myth of progress, glosses over all of the issues people are facing.

Yet if we allow all three statements to be true at the same time, we begin to see how not only is everything not getting worse, but a better world is actually possible.

He illustrates his point through child mortality rates–something we can obviously all agree is a tragedy, yet clearly see how we've improved upon the past.

Max finishes with "If we want more people to dedicate their energy and money to making the world a better place, then we should make it much more widely known that it is possible to make the world a better place." (Read the article to get the full impact of this idea, it’s great!)

Certainly, in the climate crisis, where it feels like we’re barreling towards the end of the world, all with a bitter taste that we could’ve potentially done something about it (though I feel this is up for debate), we’re stuck on the ‘world is awful’ statement.

But if we look just at climate change mitigation: wind and solar generated more of the EU’s electricity than fossil fuels in the first half of 2024. Deforestation in Colombia fell to a historic low in 2023. The EU’s Nature Restoration Law was introduced, aiming to restore at least 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030. The USA placed the first-ever federal limits on toxic 'forever chemicals' in drinking water. In April the European Court of Human Rights recognised climate change as an existential threat and pressures leaders to act immediately to protect people of all ages.

None of this is to say we have solved climate change, or that these are necessarily the steps we need to continue to solve climate changes, but they go to show there are efforts towards the world becoming a better place, efforts that we so often ignore. I haven’t even mentioned all the community efforts and tiny changes people are making every damn day to make this world a better place.

We can celebrate our progress ('the world is better'), whilst understanding the shit still going on ('the world is awful') and still have hope for where we're going ('the world can be much better').

Understanding that the 'olden days' weren't always horrific and that we aren't always living the best life humanity has ever lived is important to know what we can do next. That ploughing forward and ignoring all warning signs isn't the way forward because of expected progress.

In fact, I believe we had to do these things for us to realise it's bad. I’ve noticed this so many times in my little life. We believe a certain way of doing things, of living, is expected and we try and try and try until we horrifically burn out.

We can see this in countless examples throughout the last few centuries; The Radium Girls, asbestos, lead, the list is endless. Obviously, it would’ve been better if we took more of a precautionary principle approach, rather than being blinded by capitalist progress we fully understood the effects of the things we were doing before we did them.

Being alive in this industrial-growth society means living inside of these contradictions in every action we take. Seeing the mistakes we have made and the places we have strayed off path allows us to understand where we need to do the work and make the world a better place. 

I know if I feel stuck in the ‘world is awful, I feel helpless, frozen, overwhelmed—TERRIFIED. If I jump over to ‘world is much better ‘ (rare, but has been known) I might feel relief, but this is where cognitive dissonance takes its uncomfortable hold. If I visit the idea that "the world can be much better" for a while I suddenly feel impetus, movement, possibility.

And if I have the capacity to hold all three? Feels more like truth.

P.S. If you enjoy my writing, you can buy me a coffee to fuel my work.

1. I came across this quote in Charles Eisenstein's The Ascent Of Humanity