In fact, this is perhaps the most insidious thing that people tell us—or that we tell ourselves—when we feel sad or insecure. It provokes enormous cognitive dissonance: “This is perfect?” you think (after the brief glow of the compliment wears off). And that suggests one of two logical conclusions: Either you face a bleak status quo with no hope of self-improvement, or the outside world must be to blame for your unhappiness. The first conclusion leads to utter darkness; the second to angry rebellion against a malevolent universe. The truth is that you are not perfect, and neither is anyone else. And this is incredibly good news: If you can accept this reality, you will have hope of improving yourself and your life. Then you will be happier.
The melting ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are climate change’s most dangerous Big Bad, capable of altering the very face of the planet. All the adaptation we could muster can’t hold back the 25 feet or so of sea level rise that Greenland alone could unleash, not to mention the couple hundred more locked up at the planet’s southern extreme.
There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying...
Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of the digital technology publication The Verge, has lately taken to describing theverge.com as “the last Web site on earth.” It’s kind of a joke—there are, of course, tons of Web sites still in existence, including the likes of Facebook.com—but also kind of not a joke.