Good News Is Slow

When did the world last get 30% better in a single morning?

You can’t think of one.

Nobody can. There’s no good-news version of that.

The bad version is easy.

9/11, COVID, a market crash. They all arrived in an instant. The world got measurably worse before lunch.

That asymmetry runs everything.

Bad news is a car crash: loud, sudden, impossible to look away from.

Good news is a tree growing. It’s happening right in front of you, but so slowly that on any given day it looks like nothing at all.

Picture a newspaper whose only job is to report what changed since yesterday. The crash makes the front page every time. The tree never does, not once in 50 years. Yet over 50 years, the tree is the far bigger story.

The number of children who die before their fifth birthday has fallen by about 60% since 1990, quietly saving millions of lives.1

No headline ever ran 'Child Deaths Down 2% This Year.' It can't. It's a tree, not a crash.

So your sense that everything is falling apart is mostly a side effect of speed. You’re running on a feed built for crashes, in a world mostly built by trees.

This week, when you feel that low hum of everything getting worse, pause and ask one question: is this actually true, or is it just fast?

Then go find a tree. The quiet thing getting better that will never make the headline. It’s almost always there.

Inspired by Morgan Housel episode, “Luck, Wealth, Kids, Kindness.”

Worth a watch: Click here

That’s it for this week.

Manoj