None of us can carefully inspect the evidence for most of the beliefs that we hold and out of convenience we simply adopt the most easily available ideas.

An important cause of the belief that things are going poorly, and that the future outlook is gloomy, is the type of comparisons that a person makes.

Apparently it is built into our mental systems that no matter how good things become, our aspiration level ratchets up so that our anxiety level declines hardly at all, and we focus on ever-smaller actual dangers.

One of the problems in understanding modern life are the implicit comparisons to the past (often a nonexistent past) that people often make.