At the moment progress is desperately trying to keep up with rapidly increasing life expectancy among the world’s poorest, that’s not a bad thing but that’s also why we’re seeing so much progress but we’re not seeing the benefits much, in the developed world our life expectancy increased long ago and the result of all that progress has mostly normalized in our society and expectations, but we make up a very small percentage of the world’s actual population. Now that it’s their turn, there’s a lot of people who aren’t dying like they used to and as a result they don’t just want food, they want lights and electricity and running water and roads and cars and phones and houses and opportunities, and on the whole we want to give them access to those things and bring them out of poverty but it’s just a lot to do in only a few generations. Demographics get really wild when you start to understand their relationships to larger scale things like economics and world population, and these kind of demographic changes have serious consequences when applied across literally billions of people. It gets less depressing if you make a point of appreciating the very real progress that has been made to billions of peoples lives around the world. Yeah there’s a lot of bad stuff going on, but we seem to prefer to talk about that and the actual, measurable good stuff doesn’t get much acknowledgement.

Based on projections from demographics, most of the countries in the world should be in really good shape in about 50 years, population growth should level off, and we should be able to share the benefits of progress worldwide. At least if civilization hasn’t collapsed into a new dark age, and we haven’t turned the planet into an oven, nuked each other out of existence, written the Earth off and fucked off to Mars, or found some other creative way to destroy ourselves by then. So at least there’s like a 0.1% things will work out alright.