As you improve some parts of your life it can make other parts of your life seem worse, even if they’re improving as well. As I shared last year, the world is in far better shape than you might realize, and it just seems bad in comparison to perfect.
In his book “Enlightenment Now“, author Steven Pinker shares a few examples of this:
“When I grew up, bullying was considered a natural part of boyhood. It would have strained belief to think that someday the president of the United States would deliver a speech about its evils, as Barack Obama did in 2011. As we care about more of humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.”
“But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.”
He even adds a great quote from Franklin Pierce Adams that: “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
This certainly don’t mean things are perfect. Hans Rosling (in “Factfulness“) points out that “things can be bad, and getting better”.
Really, though, I think a simple (and very relatable) quote from Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s “Burnout” says it best:
“When you paint the dingiest wall in a room, it just makes the other walls look dingier.”
We’ve all done that with our house; we’ll put a lot of work into one room, and it’s fantastic, but now you see how far behind the rest of the house is. While this can be a bit demoralizing, perhaps, it creates fuel for you to continue to improve the things around you.
High standards might make things look worse, but they actually are pushing us in the right direction to make everything a little bit better.
