Sublime

Yglesias argues that the progressive politics of the 2010s encouraged progressives to think of everything in catastrophic terms, making them less happy. In essence, he sees teenagers as having been prodded by political and media figures into adopting the same kind of doomer worldview espoused by people like Taylor Lorenz.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence,

For cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, it is vital that we appreciate how much progress we have made in liberal democracies—and that we owe that progress to Enlightenment humanism—if we wish it to continue: A liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problem