"It feels like the world is ending - and I can't stop reading about it"

The feeling in the headline is exactly what many people in the press, and most politicians, would like you to feel all the time. It's literally their job to make you feel helpless and terrified.

Journalists need your clicks. Politicians need your votes. They've converged on a strategy that involves damaging your emotional life -- and your character -- to get what they want. A terrified citizen checks the news compulsively, especially the most alarming stories, and he always votes for the strongest of the strongmen, the one who will do everything he can to protect us from even the tiniest of dangers, and he'll spare no expense to do it.

A person of better character might wonder what good could possibly come of all this fear. Even if the world were really and truly ending, our fear wouldn't help.

And yet the world is not ending. It is rapidly improving.

For the first and only time in human history, global life expectancy, wealth, literacy, health outcomes, and most measures of individual freedom have all been getting better. It's not just by a little, but by a lot. For the first and only time in human history, it's maybe okay not to despair at the human condition. Maybe it's not just an endless cycle of misery and despotism. It's an astounding time to be alive.

These are empirical facts. Not only are they true for humanity as a whole, but they have been true since about the year 1800. We live, right now, at the absolute height of the first and only era of real material progress. And tomorrow will in all likelihood be better than today.

The rest of the article is uninteresting, except for its complete obliviousness.