Was 2017 that terrible? Everyone feels like they’re losing and the world is going to hell, and in many ways it does feel like a dark cloud is approaching.
This article, about a sex robot conference being moved after a threat from Islamic extremists, did strike me as the sort of thing one of the more pessimistic of 20th century writers might have predicted about our age. People are so depressed about the year they even got angry about Taylor Swift being happy, because how dare she.
And yet despite this being such a terrible year medical progress continues in a miraculous way, worldwide poverty continues to tumble and while the planet is more violent than at the beginning of the decade, it has nothing like as many wars nor as many casualties as the 70s or 80s. Christmas is still being celebrated in Damascus and Aleppo, something I didn’t expect to see four years ago. Things aren’t at all terrible, it’s just that it’s become painfully obvious that social media is
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