Why progress is hard to see

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. If someone asked you about the state of the world right now, what would you say? Odds are it would be negative. That is the vibe of the moment. And you don't have to look too far to find confirmation.

Political breakdown, ecological breakdown, AI hysteria. another war in the Mideast, a lot of things really do seem to be unraveling. But humans are wired to see all the threats, and because of that we miss a lot of the good things happening around us. If you pull back from the immediate spectacle of politics and look over a longer stretch of time, you can see something else too. You can see real shifts in values, in norms, in what counts as justice, in who counts.

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