Modern Worries

Hope is more fragile than fear. Good outcomes often require that many things all go well, while bad outcomes often need only one particular thing to go wrong. But as bad outcomes are rare, if you think about what concretely might happen to you in the next day, hopes and fears are of similar magnitude.However, as you widen the scope that you consider, both in time and social impact, your fears grow relative to hopes. For the world over the next half century, you have far more fears than hopes.The more things and processes that you know about that happen in the world, and the more interdependent your world, the more pieces you can combine to create worrisome scenarios. Furthermore, you can build worries from abstract categories of things and processes, even if you don’t understand those well enough to develop specific worry scenarios. So knowing more, including more abstractions, gives you more things to worry about.The ancient world did have some abstract worries, like gods, but a…