Thread by @bopinion

Let’s take a break from worrying about the apocalypse and celebrate some good news:

👴🏾We're living longer
🍊We're healthier
👧🏼Child mortality is down
💵Poverty is decreasing
📖Literacy is increasing
🔫We're killing each other less trib.al/ZR5Uwok

Millennials are cooler than their predecessors😎

🌡No, literally. Millennials in the U.S. today have an average body temperature 1.06ºF cooler than Americans did in the 1800s, if they’re male, and 0.58ºF cooler if they’re female trib.al/ZR5Uwok

Our body temperatures are dropping due to a steady decrease in inflammation.

In short, we’re getting healthier – and living longer trib.al/ZR5Uwok

👧🏿Thanks to modern medicine, we’re close to eliminating child mortality.

In 2017, 96.1% of the population survived their first five years, compared to 56.7% in 1800 trib.al/ZR5Uwok

We’re not just living longer, but we’re living better.

The number of people living in extreme poverty is decreasing, while more people than ever are able to read and write trib.al/ZR5Uwok

We’re also killing each other less.

Despite our increasingly lethal weapons, the deaths in war keep decreasing trib.al/ZR5Uwok

🦠And, if you’re still worried about the next pandemic, here’s some good news:

Scientists are already working on a cure trib.al/7F8jjUg

Why do we spend less time celebrating our advances than worrying about the bad stuff?

It could be a side effect of evolution: It’s much more useful for survival to dread the saber-toothed tiger than to rejoice in another day of fine metabolism trib.al/ZR5Uwok

That same evolution has given us a flawed perception of risk.

📱We should stop fretting about cell phone radiation and be more concerned about using them while driving, for example trib.al/ZR5Uwok

We also don’t dread the climate crisis, the way we feared the saber-tooth tiger.

We have made such progress in other areas. We can do it again trib.al/ZR5Uwok