Thread by @UrsulaV

Beloved friends, I know it’s easy to feel like everything is getting worse, and god knows, I feel like that sometimes myself. But I try to remind myself that a hundred years ago, we hadn’t even discovered penicillin.

It was barely fifty years ago scientists figured out that dopamine and serotonin are involved in depression and started being able to treat that directly.

Almost exactly a hundred years ago, insulin was discovered, and suddenly a whole chunk of humans weren’t sentenced to a terrible death.

In my lifetime, smallpox was eradicated. (I can’t actually tell you how huge that is, because I can barely comprehend it myself.) HIV went from a death sentence to a treatable chronic condition.

The first solar panel ran at 1% efficiency and cost around $300 a watt. These days it’s 15% and down to fifty cents a watt, for solar panels you can stick on your roof.

(One of the coolest things we saw in Tibet was that in the city markets, you’d have the guy selling meat, the guy selling saddles, the guy selling cel phones and the guy selling solar panels, all right next to each other.)

And socially…phew. When I was in high school in Oregon, the Oregon Citizens Alliance tried to pass Measure 9, to amend the state constitution to condemn homosexuality. Now gay marriage is the law in this country.

Time was not so long ago, I couldn’t have opened a bank account unless my husband came with me. 101 years ago, I couldn’t have voted.

And nobody had birth control pills until 1960. Contraceptives have taken staggering leaps forward.

And I get it. It’s so easy to despair. We look at the worst heat ever recorded and the wildfires and reef bleaching and it’s all terrifying and RIGHT THERE.

But we have improved life so much for so many in a hundred years. Things are so much better.

We have dragged ourselves by the scruff of our own necks, kicking and screaming, to a better world already. Keep dragging. Drag everyone else with you. Things do get measurably better.