How did it come to this?

The day after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I said that the only other events that were comparable in how they'd made me feel were 9/11 and my first wife Cara's death. Looking back eight years later, there was absolutely no hyperbole in that statement.

It's a little unsettling how Donald Trump's second election to the presidency, while still extremely upsetting, isn't eliciting nearly as strong an emotional reaction in me - this despite his second election being a much worse event than his first. I don't think it would be out of line to suggest that this is the worst thing that has happened in our country in my lifetime. But Trump's first term in office and the COVID pandemic made me more than a little numb to bad things happening in the news. And, of course, this election result wasn't a shock in the way the 2016 result was. We were more prepared for the possibility.

On the bright side, another reason 2016 was so hard on me was that I was alone. Now I'm married to a wonderful partner in Erin and we have a beautiful three month old daughter. A daughter whose future I worry about deeply, but whose presence is an incredible source of comfort and joy.

A man who has been described as a fascist by people who worked in his first administration, who incited a violent insurrection and attempted to install himself as a dictator after losing the 2020 election, and who is a thoroughly reprehensible person in every way has just been elected to be the most powerful person in the world. It's a really bad situation! It leaves us to wonder, how is this possible? How did this happen to our country?

I have a lot of thoughts on that, but I'll just briefly summarize what I think are the three most important points:

1. Our country was founded on the idea of "all men" being "created equal" but on the reality of Black people being enslaved, and much of our country was originally built on slave labor. The Civil War ended slavery, but the whole history of the country since then has been a struggle between people fighting for the principles of equality on which the country was ostensibly founded, and people fighting to keep the racial hierarchy in place. Whenever there's major progress toward equality, there's a backlash. Reconstruction happened after the Civil War, and the backlash led to Jim Crow. A Black man was elected president, and the backlash spawned the MAGA movement.

2. For the last thirty or so years, Fox News and other right-wing media outlets have been waging a propaganda campaign that has now caused a large segment of the population to be thoroughly detached from reality on most of the issues affecting their votes. Perhaps even worse, whereas 20 years ago most of the leading GOP politicians were probably in on the scam and just using their duped audience to get more tax cuts for the rich, now many of the important figures have grown up on this propaganda diet and are themselves true believers in the cult. The ease of spread of misinformation on the Internet, of course, makes this all worse.

3. Specific to the 2024 election, the economy and inflation since the end of the pandemic led to an incredibly strong anti-incumbency voting environment worldwide. No incumbent party won a national election this year (which had never happened before), and Democrats in the U.S. did better than most. That's likely the main reason Republicans won this particular election, whereas points 1 and 2 are my postulated reasons for the emergence of the insane Trumpist cult and its takeover of one of our two major parties.

Those are my thoughts on how our country got into its current terrible condition. But that's not really what this post is about.

What I find really remarkable, looking at it all, is not that this catastrophe happened in the country I was taught as a child was the greatest on Earth. What I find really remarkable is, well, everything.

Everything about human society. Everything that human beings have accomplished. How? How did it all happen?

Collective human achievement

There are so many amazing things that humanity has achieved. We often take it for granted, but if you take a moment to think about it, it's really quite staggering. We've risen from primitive hunter-gatherer ancestors to create a world-spanning civilization. We've sent humans to the moon and sent space probes to the farthest reaches of our solar system, where we can still communicate with them from Earth many decades after they were launched. We've cracked the genetic code underlying life. We've created vaccines that have saved hundreds of millions of human lives. We've created tremendous and awe-inspiring works of art and culture and music. We've created various modes of transit enabling individuals to cover distances unimaginable on foot, from the airplane to the bicycle (the most efficient form of transportation there is). We've created a global communications network on which we can almost instantaneously look up almost any piece of human knowledge. The list goes on and on and on.

What's really awe-inspiring about all this is that none of these things could ever have been accomplished by a single person starting from scratch. In fact, the distance from what a single person starting from scratch could accomplish to what humanity has accomplished is so vast that it seems absurd. Everything we take for granted in life is the result of the cumulative work of countless other humans over tens and hundreds and thousands of years. It's all been built up over those years on scaffolding built by the people who came before. And for that scaffolding to hold, a functional society, in one form or another, had to exist.

Human beings did not evolve to live in a society like the one in which we live. We evolved to live in small groups of people without any of the technology that makes modern society possible and without any knowledge of what was happening in the rest of the world. Over the last few millennia and especially the last few centuries, the pace of evolution of human society has vastly outstripped the pace of our biological evolution. Biologically, a human today isn't tremendously different from a human ten thousand years ago. Take a newborn from today and transport them to ten thousand years in the past, or take a newborn from ten thousands years in the past and transport them to today, and they'd not be aware of anything amiss and would grow up a totally normal member of the society to which they'd been transported. But do the same time travel with an adult, and they'd be utterly befuddled by the strange world they found.

I don't think there's any other species for which this would be true, certainly not to nearly the same extent as it would be for humans.

I'm of the firm belief that the human brain is the most amazing thing in the known universe. A biological supercomputer in an organism that evolved over billions of years from primitive single-celled ancestors and can perform so many incredible computations and feats, the underlying mechanisms of which we're only beginning to understand. One of my favorite things about my brain is that in its neural networks are stored tens of thousands of different songs (some stored with higher fidelity than others). How do our brains do that? Why do our brains do that? And that's far from the most amazing thing about the brain.

All the amazing feats of humanity I listed are the accomplishments of the human brain, but not just one human brain, thousands upon thousands of human brains collaborating across both space and time.

But something that takes millennia to build can be destroyed in an instant.

The human brain is an amazing thing, but it has many failure modes, and it wasn't designed to deal with the complexities of the modern world. Given the right (or wrong) circumstances, a whole bunch of human brains might collectively decide that electing someone like Donald Trump to be their leader is a good idea.

Democracy

Our country was founded nearly 250 years ago as a representative democracy. It wasn't the first attempt at a democratic system of government in history, but at the time, it was a big divergence from how nations were typically run. The founders of our country were embarking on a grand experiment, one they feared wouldn't last. Benjamin Franklin was famously quoted as answering, when asked if our government would be a republic or a monarchy, "a republic, if you can keep it."

And to quote a timely and unsettling recent Atlantic article by Tom Nichols:

[George] Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment.

Clearly, Donald Trump is the sort of demagogue that Washington feared. Trump frequently expresses admiration for dictators, would enjoy being one himself, and already tried to make himself one four years ago. (Note: if you disagree with these statements despite the mountains upon mountains of evidence, no amount of evidence will ever convince you, and this post probably isn't for you.)

It seems remarkable, given that Trump has now been voted into office not just once but twice, that in the previous nearly two and a half centuries no one of that nature had ever been elected to the presidency. Quite a few previous presidents did despicable things, some assaulted democratic norms in certain ways, but none ever tried to keep their hold on power when their time in office was up. All respected the founding principle of our country that power lies with the people and not with any one man. All until Trump.

Why did this happen now and never before? Is there something special about our present era, or was it a fluke occurrence? The sample size is just too small (n = 1 would-be despots among 45 men who have held the presidency) to draw any conclusion.

It is important to note that America didn't truly become a full-fledged representative democracy until less than 60 years ago with the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It's possible that democracy will both have been achieved and ended in this country within my parents' lifetimes. Will we still have free and fair elections in four years? I'm hopeful, but I wouldn't place a bet in either direction.

Democracy, it seems, is a fragile thing. Every time there's an election and the ruling party loses, for democracy to continue, they have to cede power. Every time. If just one time, those in charge decide not to respect the results of an election, they get their followers on board, and they have their hands firmly enough on the levers of power to succeed in their scheme, then bam, no more democracy. After the 2020 election Trump decided not to respect the results and got a lot of his followers on board but he didn't have enough control of the levers of power and there were still enough safeguards in place. Will that still be true if Trump or another MAGA Republican tries the same thing in the future?

Going from democracy to authoritarianism seems much simpler than the reverse. In the 1930s, Germany went from democracy to authoritarianism. Going back to democracy only happened after the fascist regime lost a horrifically bloody World War. That's not a typical course of events and not one that anyone would hope to see happen! The 1930s also saw a fascist movement in America. Perhaps it was because we fought the Nazis in WWII that the idea "fascism is bad" became strongly enough ingrained in the American identity for it to take most of a century before the resurgence of such a movement. Long enough for memories of that devastating war to have faded.

Anyway, I guess one aspect of "how did it come to this?" is "how has democracy even persisted for this long?"

Trying to understand a complex world

As I already stated, the human brain was not meant to understand a world as big and complex as ours. The decisions that voters make depend in part on how they understand the world. But do most voters, in any meaningful sense, understand the world?

In our modern world, we have access to just such an overwhelming amount of information. How can the average person filter out the good information from the bad? Honestly, in many cases, I doubt it's even possible. And once someone starts down the path of a given system of beliefs, algorithms just provide more and more information to reinforce those beliefs, regardless of the accuracy of that information.

It's no wonder that so many people believe so many untrue things. But was it any different in the past?

People today have access to far more information than people in any previous era of history. And a huge amount of that information is bad information. But it's not like people in the past were getting only good information.

Think about someone 50 years ago. 100 years ago. 200 years ago. How was their understanding of the world formed? They didn't have the Internet. They could get information from things like school, newspapers, books, people they knew, or authority figures in religion, business, politics, etc. There's no guarantee that most of that information was accurate, and undoubtedly, a lot of it wasn't. And today it's at least possible for an ordinary person to find accurate information on just about any given topic. In the early years of our nation's existence, there was no way to do this!

So yes, the explosion of misinformation today makes it hard for people to correctly understand what's going on in the world. But were most people in the past any better able to understand the world than most people today are? I doubt it.

Another important point is that whether people were getting their information from newspapers and authority figures in their community or whether they're getting it from the Internet and cable TV, people who already have money and power have a baked in advantage at getting their views out and influencing people's beliefs. Propaganda is effective.

Although I doubt that average people's understanding of the world has gotten significantly worse over time, I do have some speculation on how the changing information environment might contribute to the mess we find ourselves in today.

One, although propaganda has always existed and has always been effective, I think that cable TV, the Internet, and the consolidation of media from many independent sources to largely being controlled by a handful of corporations have together made it much easier for certain bad actors to capture a large portion of the population with the same coordinated propaganda messages. A century ago, a rich businessman who wanted to control what people thought of him might have purchased a newspaper that served one city, or maybe even a few newspapers for a few cities. Today, someone like that might buy, oh, Twitter? That is, one of the major means of disseminating and discussing news for the entire world.

Two, I think that the fact that we have access to so much information might give people misplaced confidence in their own understanding of the world. Maybe in the past, most people accepted that they didn't really understand the bigger picture of how the world works because they didn't have access to much information on how it works. So maybe they placed more confidence in authority figures, who often did understand things at least better than the average person did. Today a lot of people are very confident in beliefs about how the world works that are totally detached from reality, and think they know better than authority figures (on topics such as, for example, vaccines) when they really don't.

Three, I think the Internet has a big reinforcing effect on extreme beliefs. Before the Internet, people's views were more influenced by other people in their physical communities. If you started getting into a really crazy belief system, it wouldn't be likely that everyone around you would have those same crazy beliefs. The information you got from people around you could pull you back toward reality. Today, if you believe something crazy, you can find a community of like-minded individuals online and get most of your information from that online bubble, and then your crazy beliefs will just be pulled more and more toward craziness.

That's just speculation, though, and the general statement that most people have never had a good understanding of how the world works and have never made truly well-informed decisions when selecting their leaders is one I feel pretty confident about!

Evidence

I'm a scientist. From childhood, I've been passionate about learning things, acquiring knowledge about the amazing world in which we live. As a child, I did this mainly by reading books. Acquiring knowledge through reading continues to be something I love, but an exciting aspect of my career is acquiring new knowledge - knowledge that not only I didn't have before, but no one had before.

To make a claim of a new piece of knowledge, one should have strong evidence for that claim. I inhabit a world where arguments are made by accumulating evidence for the argument and presenting it in an organized, logical way. To me, if you want to convince someone to your point of view, that's the best way to do it. So I've spent a lot of time in my life, especially on the Internet, presenting a pile of evidence, data and graphs and explanations, to try to persuade people to my perspective on various issues. I'm not saying that my perspective has always been right, but that's how I operate.

I've come to realize that most of the time, this doesn't actually work.

If someone strongly believes in something, most of the time you can present all the evidence in the world to them and even if their belief is utterly wrong and the evidence shows it's wrong, their mind isn't going to be changed.

In the case of the 2024 election, the deciding issue, the reason Democrats were in an almost impossible position as the incumbent party, was the state of the economy and inflation. And you could show people graphs that illustrate how inflation has been a worldwide problem and how since the pandemic ended it's dropped more in the U.S. than it has in peer nations, so it makes no sense to blame inflation on the Biden administration. You could show people articles about how basically all credible experts say Trump's proposed policies would be terrible for the economy. A reasoned, evidence-based argument would show that voting for Trump because of the economy and inflation is at best horribly misguided. But this literally doesn't matter to most voters.

Something that I've noticed about myself and that I've come to feel is fairly unusual is that if I believe something and then come across solid evidence that seems to contradict that belief, I get excited and want to learn more so I can better understand the topic and update my beliefs. In my first ever research project, I set out to find evidence supporting a hypothesis that I was initially led to believe was probably correct, but I eventually discovered that the hypothesis was probably incorrect, and I very enthusiastically pursued and laid out the evidence.

Most people, it seem, just don't function in that way. If they already believe something, showing them evidence to the contrary doesn't seem to make much difference. This is often true even with scientists, I've found. Other scientists I've worked with have been very tied to certain pet hypotheses and are very resistant to accepting evidence that those hypotheses are wrong. I'm not saying I'm immune to this - we all have our biases - but I honestly do feel a certain glee in accumulating evidence to dismantle a belief that I previously held! I can think of multiple times I've done this!

I think that no belief should be held too strongly unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and I think that's a philosophy that more people should follow, but that's not the reality of how people form beliefs. People come to very strongly believe things based on scant or misleading evidence, and after that happens, showing them that the evidence against their belief is overwhelming is usually (not always, but usually) a pointless exercise.

Everyone believes lots of things that aren't true. Most people very strongly believe in some things that aren't true, to the extent that trying to change their minds using evidence and logic is pointless. Some of those beliefs are more harmful than others. And some of those beliefs are more widespread than others. Some very widespread and very harmful incorrect beliefs have basically formed the basis for the existence of the MAGA cult, with consequences such as (among many others) a violent insurrection attempt and hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID deaths among people who didn't get vaccinated. But people from all parts of the political spectrum also strongly hold various other incorrect beliefs.

This has undoubtedly always been true, and I think it's really interesting to consider this when we think about not only the problems we face, but also about all the great things humans have achieved.

Discovery 

So much of what we take for granted about modern life could not exist without scientific discovery. Doing good science is hard work. It's not for everyone. It requires inquisitiveness, sharp observation skills, critical thinking, an ability to evaluate the strength of evidence with both an open mind and skepticism - skepticism being especially important, and this is one of the hardest parts for most, when evaluating your own ideas - and more. Most people don't have all these qualities. (Whether most people inherently don't have all these qualities or if they could develop them under the right circumstances is something I'm not sure about.) Based on my own personal experience, even many people who do science for a living seem to not have the right skill set to do truly good and rigorous science.

Multiple people whose opinions I value highly have said that I'm a very good scientist, and it's something I take a lot of pride in. Discovering new things about how the natural world works and doing so in a rigorous way so that we can feel confident we're describing something real is an awe-inspiring experience. And maybe being able to do it well is a rare gift. That doesn't mean scientists are better or more important than other people, of course. There are all sorts of talents people have which they use to contribute to society in all sorts of valuable ways. Taking care of other people. Creating beautiful art. Producing food and turning that food into delicious meals. Etc., etc., etc.

Without there being some people with the ability to discover true things about how the world works, though, society wouldn't have progressed very far.

(How can we know for sure that we're discovering true things? Well, we can never be 100% sure, but if we build models of reality that make predictions and our models approximate the truth, then the predictions should come true. For example, our understanding of how diseases and immunity work led to predictions about the effects of giving vaccines - and those predictions were validated when vaccinated people had much lower rates of getting sick and dying.)

This doesn't always have to be via strict application of scientific methods. People have discovered things about the world in many ways. But a common element of these discoveries is that people make predictions based on their understanding of the world, and then collect and evaluate evidence to see whether those predictions come true. This could apply to anything from the development of agricultural methods to the development of gravitational theory.

This is kind of meandering but the point I'm getting to is that, based on the culture of a society and the priorities of its leaders, scientific discovery and the resulting progress might be encouraged or might be discouraged. In the United States, in the last century a high priority was placed on promoting and funding scientific research, and it helped us become the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world. (That's not to say that scientific discovery hasn't also led to bad things, but it's worth noting that before the development of modern medicine and sanitation/hygiene methods, average human life expectancy was less than 40.) Societies led by religious extremists, on the other hand, have generally not valued science and have often acted to prevent it from being freely undertaken (see, for example, Galileo being called a heretic for his correct claim that the Earth orbits the Sun).

Donald Trump is very clearly someone who does not value a correct understanding of how the world works. Listening to him speak on a variety of subjects from climate change to economic policy, he doesn't even seem capable of understanding complex issues. What he seems good at understanding (perhaps intuitively) is how to con people and get gullible people to like him. But another thing he surely does know is that scientists and educated people in general tend not to like him. (This is probably because being educated makes it easier to recognize that Donald Trump is a crazy idiot and a fraudster.) Hence, a society run by someone like Donald Trump is not going to be a society that values or encourages discovery and knowledge. In Donald Trump's world, the truth has no value. The only value any belief has is whether that belief helps Trump. And because an understanding of how the world works leads to the inevitable recognition that Trump's ideas are incoherent and harmful, people who honestly strive to understand how the world works must be shunned.

A society entirely controlled by people with such values would be a society in which scientific discovery would rarely happen and even more rarely have any lasting influence. And because scientific discovery is a process that builds on itself over centuries, if people like Donald Trump had been in charge of human society for all of history, none of the amazing things we have as a result of that science would exist. Modern medicine? Gone. Modern transportation methods? Gone. Weather prediction? Gone. Television and radio and the Internet? Gone.

None of it would ever have existed.

What makes humanity great

Humans individually and the human race collectively have done so many great and good things. The most staggering achievements to me are (1) the discoveries we've made about the world and universe from the inner workings of the atom to the evolution of life to the wonders of the cosmos and (2) the indescribably beautiful works of art and music and literature and architecture that in their own way also say so much about the nature of reality and of our existence. But there's also, I think, a basic goodness to most human beings in the compassion that we have for other people and animals. I've witnessed it so many times and it's so sad when it gets pushed into hiding by the hateful rhetoric and propaganda that so often dominate our politics. But I think it's still there. Cara, when she was sick with the lung cancer that eventually took her life, once wrote, "I cry, but most times it's out of gratitude and awe. I am moved every single day by the kindness of friends, family and total strangers." Those words still ring true to me most of the time, even if kindness does seem to be in shorter supply these days in segments of our society.

To me, those are the biggest things that make humanity great. Sadly, Donald Trump is the antithesis of all those things.

He has no intellectual curiosity and shuns any attempt to understand the world if it would undermine him. He's never shown, to my knowledge, any meaningful appreciation for arts and culture, and people like him in general tend to value such pursuits for their use as propaganda rather than for trying to gain any insight into the human condition. And lastly and most importantly, he is entirely self-centered and seems functionally unable to understand concepts like empathy or working for a greater good (see, for example, his many disparaging comments about soldiers).

If human society had always had people like Donald Trump in charge, most of the amazing discoveries humans have made about the world would never have happened and society would never have progressed anywhere. But beyond that: if the human race was entirely made up of people like Donald Trump, people that self-centered and amoral, our species would likely have gone extinct long ago.

Gratitude and awe

When I really take a step back and think about all the things I've gotten to do in my life, I'd have to consider myself very lucky. A lot of people talk about what a horrible place the world has become. In some ways, I suppose that's true, although in some ways, things have always been horrible. But then there's the good. The things I've gotten to do that most people in human history never could have dreamed of.

I've traveled by airplane to take amazing vacations in Costa Rica and Spain and fantastic destinations throughout our country. Only possible within the last century.

I've seen so many incredible concerts. A part of human life for who knows how long, but the diversity of genres and sounds we have today has only existed for decades. And I can carry my entire music collection (over 16,000 songs) in my pocket. Only possible within the last two decades. (Yes, of course, it's possible to access even far more music than that on a device you carry in your pocket, but fuck Spotify, musicians deserve a living wage, rant over.)

I've gotten to experience the joy and exhilaration and sense of freedom that come from riding a bicycle. Only in wide use since the late 19th century. And mountain biking? That's only taken off in the last few decades.

I've discovered a previously unknown function of a specific motor neuron in the feeding system of the sea slug Aplysia californica. Every member of the species has this neuron (one of many neurons that have been identified through decades of painstaking work by many researchers) and the neuron does this specific thing in this specific behavior and before me, no one ever knew this, and now we do. That might sound interesting or it might just sound really weird, I don't know, but to me it's so incredibly cool to be able to discover real things about how the world works and about how life works and about how animal behavior works. Animal behavior is so fascinating (humans, of course, are animals, and our behavior is some of the most fascinating of all). The ability to do research of this sort on the functions of single neurons is something that has also only existed for a matter of decades.

Think of all the amazing and cool things you've gotten to do in your life that depend on the ingenuity and hard work and creativity of human beings, past and present. I'm sure there are a lot.

I have an immense amount of gratitude for all the collective achievements of humanity that have made all those incredible experiences possible.

Simultaneously, I'm in awe that all those things were collectively achieved by the same species that, collectively, could also do something as indescribably fucking stupid as elect Donald Trump president.

Not just once, but twice. And the second time more convincingly! Which might make one wonder whether our species, which has such an incredible capacity for learning by individuals and small groups of people, is even capable of learning at an overall collective level.

One day in May 2019, I was walking through New York City and on a sidewalk near the main branch of the public library, I saw this:

I was so struck by these words. I think there's so much truth in them.

I think that deep down, we humans haven't changed much over the whole course of recorded human history. We're still pretty nearly the same, as biological entities, as we were when our country was founded, or in ancient Rome, or 10,000 years ago. But the world has changed so much and society has changed so much and the human race has accomplished so many staggering feats, all through the actions of people building on the actions of people before them building on the actions of people before them.

Think about it. All the tasks we do in our day to day lives that seem so normal, like driving a car or going on the Internet or cooking dinner, we weren't designed to do and we didn't evolve to do any of those things. Our brains simply evolved to have the flexibility and adaptability to be able to do many things, and then cultural and technological evolution far outstripped the pace of biological evolution, and now all those things seem like second nature even though there's nothing innate in us when we're born that instructs us on how to do them.

And everything we as a species have accomplished, we've accomplished despite what I believe is very likely to be the case (although I might, of course, be wrong) that the majority of things believed by the majority of people about how the world works are basically wrong.

I'm not saying this as a call out of Trump voters, by the way; I think this is true of people in general.

At best, any single person can understand a few specific things really well, understand a much broader range of things moderately well, and have the humility to recognize that there are far more things that they don't understand. Most people, I think, don't reach that bar. The world is so much bigger and more complicated than what our brains evolved to comprehend that I don't think it's even realistic for most people to reach it.

A common refrain I've heard about the election is "voters are idiots." It's tempting to agree, but let's examine this statement. If we say "voters are idiots," we're really saying "human beings are idiots." Human beings are a species of animal. It's common to say we're the most intelligent animal on this planet. Certainly, we seem to have the most cognitive capacity. If human beings are idiots, what does that make all the other animals? Would we say, for instance, "crows are idiots"? What would that even mean?

Humans have the greatest capacity to understand the world we inhabit and how it works... but perhaps this also means we have the greatest capacity to misunderstand the world.

Perhaps humans are simultaneously the smartest animals and the stupidest animals.

Perhaps that's just the duality of mankind and the duality of life. Both wonderful and terrible. We couldn't have one without the other. We're just a bunch of hairless apes living in a world we weren't mean to live in and that none of us could ever hope to really understand, just trying to do the best we can in our own little lives, in a society built on layers upon layers of scaffolding erected by long dead people who similarly didn't really understand the world around them and were just trying to to the best they could in their own little lives, and somehow it all still works (often not very well but well enough to keep going) and we keep innovating and discovering and creating the most astonishing and fantastic and beautiful things while also doing the most stupid and cruel and pointless things, and...

And I don't know how much of this will even make sense to anyone, but everything I've written in this post is what I've been spending a lot of time thinking about for the last nine days. In November 2016 I learned that my expectations of humanity had been too high and I became horribly depressed as a result. In November 2024 I've learned that my expectations should be ratcheted down yet another notch, but instead of being depressed, I find myself in awe of all the good and wonderful things that such a flawed species has achieved.

Maybe it's just that my brain is constantly bathing in oxytocin thanks to spending time with my beautiful daughter.

I know it's not easy in times like this. I know that I'm lucky to not be directly threatened the way a lot of people are. But in a world with so much horror and so much beauty, we do have a choice in what gets our attention. And so much of how we feel and our mental and emotional states can be determined by where our attention is directed. This is something I know well from experience.

We shouldn't ignore the horror. But constantly immersing ourselves in it isn't helpful either. Focusing on the beauty can help us to just get through the day and have the energy and motivation to fight the horror. Try it, if you haven't.

It's even supported by science.