The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. 

This video is an adaptation of Max Roser's article, "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better." It's a simple yet important point that society at large underappreciates. Yet, it's a crucial aspect of humanity's trajectory and quite relevant to how we think about the future.

The cup is half empty The cup is half full The cup could have more water

I shall name the dark feline "Skepticat."

Every man across every era, race, religion, and culture has two opposing mentalities: 1. We're so over. 2. We're so back.

It's also important to remember the fourth, though arguably less important one: the world can be worse. The world is so much better than it has been, and it has potential to be even better. But to achieve that we need to maintain its health (e.g. climate change, democracy, AI safety).

...And the world could be worse. This is also an important realization, because many of the things making the world better required active efforts to maintain.

I pleasantly surprised myself when I jerked into tears at hearing that 99.55% of children in the EU make it. Like, holy crap that's stunningly beautiful - what else are we capable of as a species?

It's incredibly satisfying for R.A. to point their cute little paw at a conclusion or data.

I resonate with this a lot. As an immigrant to the US from a poor developing country its very clear how the world can be amazing and awful at the same time. And it's not unanimous that developed > underdeveloped under these lenses. It's often in these harder situations that you see change and you see people that truly believe in change as they see it everyday. Thanks

If only so many people weren't fundamentally against change for some reason that they cant explain but cling onto desperately

I want a time-machine, so I can go back 7 years to ask Rob Miles if he thinks that this statement is highly probable: "Robert, your path ahead with the greatest positive impact... is to be a voice-actor for a cat."

Thesis: The world is awful Antithesis: The world is much better Synthesis: The world can be much better

I do have a problem with charities in that they are usually a temporary fix. So for instance if conditions change and the charity has to leave an area (due to war, corruption, etc), then their effect is eliminated. For true change, government policy (at a minimum) needs to embrace, commit, and fund the charity's solution itself.

This reminds me a lot of Hans Rosling and his philosophy, which goes something like: You should be able to hold two thoughts about the world at once; things are getting better, and they're not good enough. Or the short version; the world is bad, but better. I would highly recommend his book Factfulness, about our human biases that make it easy for us to tend towards a negative worldview, despite how well we're doing on so many fronts. And thanks for another great video, keep up the amazing work!

I don't want to survive. I want to live

Great perspective, and central to the issue of the viability of continuous improvement. In a novel I'm reading, a professor and mentor responds to the defeatist, "glass half empty" attitude of his student by pouring a half-empty glass of beer on him. He asks whether it was the empty half or the full half that made the strongest impression. The student goes on to head a historic project expected to be a great achievement for humanity.

Only the Avatar can master all four elements: The world is awful, the world is better, the world can be better, the world can be worst.

This is what i've been thinking for years now! So good to have it put into words, thank you so much for this amazing video! I see a lot of people around me fall into that trap of pessimism, that "The world is so cruel and unjust, and it will only get worse and worse and worse...", and although it may be half true, looking at the whole picture, history is a story of development, it is a course that goes steadily up and up, and goes faster every year. The world IS getting better, and it has never _stopped_ getting better. Yes, we have a few blips of devolution here and there, but the trend is clear enough. The world we live in is the best that has ever existed up until now, and the worst that will exist from here on out. Never forget this. And never stop fighting for that change, because it is possible, and it is coming, and it is coming because of you. This way of thinking from my personal experience comes about from a grasp of history more than anything. I only started developing these ideas once i got into military history, for example. More specifically, the human aspect of military history. Seeing what men felt and how life was and how terrible it must have been really opened my eyes to this. Reading about horrible things does not necessarily lead one to pessimism, it leads them to knowledge. And knowledge can be applied in the most various of ways. In the same vein, history is not just something you learn in school to get good grades, it is a useful thing! One that you take to the rest of life, even if you won't actively use it in a "practical" environment. It builds and develops the mind, it provides you with the tools to create new ideas, to think rationally. Like all other disciplines, i might add!

How do you cope with the pain of knowing how hard so many people and places are being abused? Change comes so slow and with such terrible pushback

I love this, it’s just as beautiful a lesson as in “the goddess of everything else,” and that’s one of my favorite stories I’ve EVER heard

This is the sort of video i'll always keep in a bookmark to share with new friends who are only used to seeing the bad side of the world. Thank you for making a change, you're encouraging more people to do the same!

Such a simple thesis (one sentence!) that it has a good chance of becoming common knowledge. I think this is a good point to apply Overton pressure, so to speak. So thanks as always, Rational Animations!

Thank you for showing these kind of things into show that "news doesn't always tell everything you need to know"

Lately I see a frustrating trend. Any time someone criticize current situation of something being bad (especially if it's related to global warming), the almost automatic response is about all the better things we have today and that "just X amount of years ago people were poor, hungry and at the mercy of all diseases", which therefore the argument is invalid. Or your average "Oh, you hate society, yet you live in one" kind of response. Yes, of course. Some stuff got much better than the past. But some at the same time are going much worse. One shouldn't only focus on the negatives, obviously. But we shouldn't be blindly optimistic either. We shouldn't focus onto a problem only when we are directly affected by it. I understand most people, me included, don't have the time, the patience and the resources to supposedly solve world problems, but *at least* spread awareness might reach the eyes and ears of someone who can, even if partially.

The Awfulness of the world is not determined by the numbers of the dead but by the satisfaction and happiness of the living Death is awful because it affects that but just reducing sheer numbers won't do anything. We are a long way ahead, infact we have regressed from the past when it comes to the happiness and satisfaction of the living What good will happen if the children that have survived childhood become suicidal when they are teens/adults Suicide is a 100X bigger problem than Infant Mortality will ever be We need to create a better society not a better world ( This is just my opinion you can respectfully disagree with any part of it )

A better world is possible? Splendid, let's make it happen.

loved this article and love that it has a video adaptation!

"The world is much better than it once was" only holds if we nonsensically blind ourselves to only looking at humans and not the other sentient beings we share a planet with.

TLDR: Future is uncertain, but uncertanity is temporary. Better to move out of what is harming you into this uncertanity than pigeonhold yourself in a harmful shit because it's easy

The amount of nihilism that is present in modern days is baffling. Good things that there are videos like this one that show people that there is hope for the future.

Excellent video! And the animations are superb!

most people dont know about "the door problem" (mostly because it was commonly used in games)

I appreciate the importance of changing one's perspective and the incredible impact that can have on yourself, and the world around you. However, while these sorts of discussions tend to be stocked with "how's," what I feel goes missing are the "why's." We can highlight that the rate of child mortality changing over time indicates directly how the world is getting better, and that can be useful in some since. Yet if we choose to shift focus away from, for example, *why* it tends to be places like Somalia or Afghanistan that consistently have the highest rates of child mortality, we run into a problem. This approach fundamentally ignores the deeply entrenched systemic causes of poverty in the global south and treats these problems as if they existed in a vacuum. An analogy might be the perspective on reducing crime rate in the United States for example that suggests that due to some collected data, the highest concentration of criminal activity within a given city happens within some 5 mile radius. Therefore, concentrating the number of police officers within that area will result in a higher number arrests thus, crime is reduced, city becomes a better place yes? No, because this approach completely ignores the many underlying socioeconomic factors that cause people to commit crimes in the first place. The EU has the highest survival rate of children you say? Gee, you don't say. Well, they do have a great deal of wealth so that might have something to do with it as the video hinted to. I wonder however, where they managed to accumulate such large quantities of wealth and if it happens to corollate with the countries who have the lowest survival rates of children. Who's to possibly know? I'm of course being factious because not only did the western countries who today have so much got it off the backs of slaves and resource exploitation through various modes of colonization, much of these methods of exploitation still exist today, if in slightly less obvious ways. It's not so much that the US and EU have high child survival rates *and* Somalia and others do not, but more the US and EU have high child survival rates *because* other places do not. Our ability to solve these problems came at the expense of many other places lacking those abilities. Handing out vaccines, cleaning up waste we've dumped, or out sourcing low paying jobs to impoverished countries can be technically good or perhaps framed as "the world is much better," but these are the equivalent of concentrating more cops within a certain 5 mile radius and expecting it's going to solve anything besides reinforcing the same status quo that produces crime in the first place. I know these videos mean well, and I can see where they have real value. But only when the philosophy of changing ones perceptive is intrinsically linked with *why* it needed to be reexamined at all. When that crucial aspect remains absent from the conversation it only obfuscates the role of the systems of power in society. This mindset only works to enable the real systemic causes of our problems and implies that it's simply your personal or individual way of seeing things that needs to change, not the actual ones.

I am new to this channel, but I am liking it so much that I am watching every new videos of it.

I'm so so thankful for your channel! It became one of my favorites in a very short term Unlike other media, I'm so happy that you look at problems from so many different angles and, what's also very important, in such detail!

0:02 matt rose

Without rejecting the status quo, we accept injustice without question and become complacent in our moral prerogative to change things for the better. Relativism of an unsatisfactory state of being can be a good motivator for change, but so too can it be hopeful and empowering knowing what change has occured throughout our history.

This is truly inspirational. I can’t give this enough thumbs up.

I'd suggest we stop caring about the world and start living in space. Nobody will ever hear more bad news there. In space, nobody can hear your bad news! But seriously, great video. This points out the problem I see everywhere. It was to be assumed, however. Human brains can only hold onto so much information, we have evolved to write so no more brain load. We have became so big that it is impossible to consider everything at once. One of those serious problems is media manipulation. Some countries suffer from this to the extreme. Hope this will change in my lifetime.

Wow. I needed this today.

I think a big part of the difficulty is the world feels like it's so much more awful now than it *needs* to be. We can balance the world being better than ever, and it still being so far from perfect. But the bright idealistic future that we imagine feels like it could have been here 30 years ago if not for the obstacles in our path- obstacles that feel both arbitrary, and too big for us as individuals, or even for groups of shared passion, to overcome. But focusing on a smaller, more accessible scale, it feels like we barely make new progress at all; then we forget just how much the world has changed, and how much better it could be, and focus on the immediate awfulness again.

An important message that should be more widely recognized and accepted! And the video approached it so well too.

I was bombarded with quite a bit of bad news recently such that I specifically became the news downer I never ever thought I’d be. This video was simple, but it’s helped me a lot. Thank you!

I think I knew this instinctively, but it's really nice to have someone tell me out loud. Excellent video as always, and your website looks really cool too

This was a really enjoyable watch. I hope you get more attention for all the work you've put in. People need it.

Excited!

Really spectacular use of visual motifs here! I love the shots of the cat in the blue room with the orange outside

0:22 Dude this is awesome animation creativity- nice job everyone involved in making this.

THIS. I love this message

A video about the death and suffering of children? Someone send this to MatPat, he’ll love this!

I needed this

Curing diseases , eradicating poverty , stopping mortality of children men and women and misery that comes along with it. But what about misery that others bring , cheating , lying , fighting , conflict stealing etc.. Can that be solved. The misery of human behavior

“The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.” Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces I don’t think I’ve ever read anything so permanently true.

Another amazing video thank you so much!!!

Feels like breath of clean air in all doom and gloom. Thanks!

"Awful Is Better Than It Was. Therefore, We Can Improve Further."

this aligns with my worldviews. there will always be bad and good in this world. we just have to continuously learn how to adapt to it. i never liked the news, so i don't watch it. life can go in any direction, so it's important that we make our individual lives just as good as we can. even though the world is constantly on fire, we still find ways to live as well as we can. if you ever do anything in this lifetime, hear this: live, experience, have wonder, and try even if you don't know how.

I love yalls animation and music choice, that end creds song brought a tear to my eye, scientists doge for the win!

Thank you for this

I love these animations 👍

This is an amazing video... I wish everyone could see it. Well done!

New upload? It is a Good Day

We can't go by subjective judgments like "awful" or "better". If we do, we run the risk of being out-messaged by the people making material calculations. Does the world have enough resources to suit all of our needs? Can the world withstand the impact of processing and distributing said resources? These are the lenses of change. It is important to feel but feelings are for the self. It's not about "scaring" nor "encouraging". It's about organizing and mobilizing! Otherwise we will be swallowed by the profit motive.

I feel like another essential perspective, beyond believing in the mere possibility, is that of *gratitude*. (Kurzgesagt has done a lot to push this idea forwards.) I think letting people know how much we've improved is the most efficient because it lets them gain a feeling of gratitude - for all the work that was done, for the good that inherently exists in people, and for how much happier they are because of it. As a natural response to this sentiment, people will spontaneously feel generous; they will want to give, and to spend, and to make the lives of as many others as possible better and happier. I feel like this is the strongest factor here.

Honestly, this channel is doing the lord's work

Thank you for this video.

Awesome video! Thanks!

6:43 Some good news that I heard of was that the US government has agreed to make all tax-funded research freely available no later than last day of 2025. That is progress.

so we need to be humble, recognise our progress and have hope to improve

when my agricultural system is about to lose half its productivity cause rich people want more

Good stuff! I'm hopeful for the future.

Very good visualization with the three lenses 👍 Also, this guy's 4:46 relative said once: "Such stories call out to us, fill us with longing. But we are the daughters and sons of ... "

Incredible video

A fantastic video filled with great information. Thank you Miles And Thank you Aniteam

The argument in the video is flawed. This is actually not as much the case in the article, but with a critical paragraph missing I'm left needing to address the contents of the video as they are versus what they would have been if they stayed even closer to the source material (which is already nearly word-for-word). Nevertheless, the points I bring up here I feel are still important to communicate so I'll use this as an opportunity to say it even if the intentions behind the video (i.e. those behind the article) are not fully in line with my interpretation without knowing the article's context. Using the child mortality example, the video assumes that mortality in the past is at all relevant to the discussion it being high today but fails to say how. You just accept the conflation at face value. It's this propensity for vibes-based reasoning that allows people get away with using the past to deny us discussions of the present and work towards a better future. Anybody advocating for progress and a better world should reject the notion that progress of the past somehow disallows progress in the future. It needs to be called out that the claim that "the world is much better" is often used as a thought-terminating cliché, dismissing current issues by comparing them to the past. This doesn't address the real problems people are concerned about today. Saying "child mortality is too high" and responding with "it was higher in the past" implies the problem is solved to some satisfactory level and shouldn't be discussed but doesn't actually do any of the work to explain why past progress is relevant to the observation that there's still an issue. The video suggests people who think "the world is awful" deny past improvements, but in reality, saying "the world is awful" doesn't negate past progress but emphasizes ongoing issues. On the other hand, saying "the world is much better" can shut down discussions about current challenges, as it implies satisfaction with the status quo. While the video brings this up, the implication is that this is inherently a valid rebuttal to when there's not yet anything to explain its relevancy to the discussion. You need to explain why child mortality being higher in the past is reason for us to not be discussing it now. Saying "5% is an order of magnitude lower than 50%" is meaningless. Yes, small number good, I want it even smaller so you should be on my side. If you're not, you need to say why my want for an even smaller number is undesirable, and I guarantee you that "because it was larger in the past" is not going to be the hill you die on. Any reasonable person would immediately come to my same conclusion-that bringing up that we've made progress is meaningless when actually arguing against my want for more progress. The video implies that people hold the "the world is much better" position because they want the world to be as good as it can be but they just lack the information to see how it could be better than it already is. The belief that people can be reasoned into being more progressive if they were just better informed is idealistic. In reality, people often use past progress to silence criticism of opposing viewpoints. It obviously works; this video presents an uncritical acceptance that past progress is indeed an argument against discussions of today's problems. This tactic is used to gatekeep suffering and dismiss current issues by pointing to worse past conditions. The person's objective is not to make a compelling argument using the past as supporting evidence, but rather prevent someone from discussing current conditions because that person hasn't expressed enough appreciation for the progress that has already taken place. It assumes that past progress is inherently related to the idea of wanting more progress. Ultimately, the video's framing of the three positions needs to be translated into prescriptive claims so that we can analyze the person's intent and what in/action they're supporting through their statement: - "The world is awful" - We should strive to improve it. (The article made it clear that this was from a doomerism perspective such as "the world is awful and it can't be changed". This video left out that context and I don't think that the statement alone is enough to assume that the person is expressing it from a sense of hopelessness.) - "The world is much better" - We shouldn't focus on further improvements. - "The world can be much better" - We should continue working towards a better world. This helps clarify the underlying intentions and promotes more productive discussions. I'd also say this: the video specifically says that "The world is awful" viewpoint "rarely mentions any positive developments". To that I ask, why is this relevant? The video never explains why it's important to acknowledge positive developments. (The article did.) You clearly express that "The world is much better" can gloss over the problems of today which is clearly harmful, so what is the equivalent harm of the other viewpoint? The conclusion you'll reach is close to the article's, that it feels bad to never talk about anything positive. But you still need to commit that final step of saying that it may make people feel hopeless and so they become inactive. Feeling bad is not what we're trying to avoid; we're trying to avoid people being inactive. Now with regards to both the video and the article: "The problem is that we are not using the data and research we have. The data is often stored in inaccessible databases, the research is buried under jargon in academic papers and often locked away behind paywalls." No. Very few people reach their conclusions based on a preponderance of evidence-instead picking and choosing the evidence that fits their preexisting beliefs. There is plenty of publicly accessible data to reach all the correct conclusions about our ability to change the world for the better. The problem isn't accessibility to data, it's our inability to cope with a world where we know we will never understand all there is to understand. We haven't yet adapted to the sheer amount of information that's available to us and how we can no longer chalk everything up to "the gods were having a normal one today". A lot of people are extremely bothered by knowing that they know so little about the world. They're distrustful of anything they can't understand, which extends to any large, complicated structures with a myriad of competing interests like governments and the science community. They feel extreme discomfort when confronted with highly specialized fields of study that people spend their whole lives learning, which is most of science at this point. Whether it be human nature or a coping mechanism I can't say, but increasing this tolerance is what we really need to do. And I believe that's through better public education. Children need to be taught that they won't know everything and that that's okay, and then how to find trustworthy sources and sniff out bad actors when trying to learn about things they're not specialized in. PS: I want to make it abundantly clear that the video and the referenced article may as well be two separate pieces of content with the omission of a critical piece of context in the article. The majority of this post is speaking purely about the video as its meaning and implications shifted heavily when they chose to omit that information. That being this paragraph: "If we only see the problems and only hear what is going wrong, we have no hope that the future can be better. If we only hear about progress and what is going right, we become complacent and lose sight of the problems the world is facing. Both of these narrow perspectives have the same consequence: they leave us doing nothing - they are worldviews that paralyze us." This establishes how we should interpret the statements as they are contextually relevant to the point the author is making. This video leaves this context out and so the interpretation of the statements is left open for the viewer.

The world is much better for humans, but is it really better for non-human animals? Every year, tens of billions of animals live and die in awful conditions in intensive farms, and trillions are brutally killed when considering fishes. This tragedy didn't happen a century ago. So it seems that the world is much, much worse for these individuals. Besides humans and exploited animals, we must also consider the case of wild animals. But I don't know if their living conditions are better or worse overall. Any idea?

This is hands down my favorite RU-vid channel

I was thinking about Givewell, but couldn't remember the name. Now your video is sponsored by them! I'm for sure gonna be donating as soon as I get my next paycheck.

Nice video! I would add that it's not enough just to have the information. You need to distribute that information in a way that the population can understand it. I have seen many discussions online where information was not enough to change minds. I appreciate that this channel is packaging up information in easy to digest forms.

This is such a good video honestly, there is so much focus on negativity currently I feel it ends up stifling progress and makes people way too pessimistic about things

In a deterministic universe, better is a bad word.

I love your videos so much

Thank you for making this video. It is like a beacon of hope to me. I clicked on this video accidentally, thinking it would be negative, but no! Thank you once again ❤

I don't know... Not all of those 99,55% deserve a life though, which makes that development simultaneously a worse thing.

I like that cats are depressed and dogs are the voice of happiness It made my day

We will never be perfect and we don’t like that, we need to see that it’s not going to change but that other things will change.

Thanks for giving me this motivational idea❤

Man, I wish more people saw this video

Love this video and our world in data. So much better than mindless optimism or mindless pessimism.

I just clicked rainbow doggo thumbnail and this was a good video

The world be like "it's good, but it could be better"

Let's not consider: The world can be perfect!

I think it's clear that this video and the original article is about much more that just the three lenses through which the world could be viewed.

One thing I wonder is this: Is “better” relative? Can you get used to a paradise? Can you get used to hell? Would you feel the same either way?

Some of that positive outcome in the richest countries relies on things sucking in the poorest countries. This I hope is also a solvable problem, by instituting global delocratic systems of governance and industry. Also Cuba had higher life expectancy than US. If we don't democratize our resources I'm concerned most of the world will revert to being serfs

Are you suggesting we build a hospital for child mortality in Sierra Leone?

Can I get some feedback here? Right from the get-go they say the latter viewpoint, that the world is better than it was, can be repugnant to many. I’ve been of that opinion for a long time, thankful for the improvements made by our ancestors, and find the first perspective pessimistic and ungrateful, aka, repugnant. Is this also common? Part of the reason I focus on the latter viewpoint is because I don’t believe a perfect world exists, so the ‘best world possible’ likely contains a lot of death and tragedy, so rather than hold us against a hypothetical standard and considering our efforts a failure, I focus on where we fall on the scale I consider to be realistic, which just so happens to contain a lot of awful happenings, and while bad, am thankful we seem to be in a better spot than we were.

Beautiful advocacy for humanist values. This kind of stuff drives progress for all humanity, whether they realise or not. So admirable and inspiring.

So if “the world can be better” and “the world was better than it was” combined is progress than what are they when combined with “the world is awful”

This, this is beautiful.