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autisticmob · 4 years

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HELLO everyone i am now ten days out from my tiddy surgery so i think while everything is still fresh-ish in my mind I should get a rough timeline of how things went for me, just so anyone having similar stuff done in the future can have it as reference??

so under the cut is how shit went down, warning we are gonna be tmi about it for Max Information Dissemination, i will be talking about IV placement, Needles, Bleeding, Bruising, Bathroom Stuff In General, etc. so like. Be Warned.

OKAY SO what did i have done and how did i get it:

- i got a bilateral breast reduction with a “T,” “keyhole,” or “anchor-shaped” incision. this procedure, unlike double-incision top surgery, does not detach your nipples at all, but it DOES leave a decent hunk of breast tissue behind to avoid the nip graft. this connecting tissue keeps your nip attached and supplied with enough blood to survive. that means with this one, theres basically a limit to how much they can take off, and it depends on how big you are to start off with.

- i went with the T-incisions because as a NB person, I wanted to sidestep the “gender-confirming surgery” route with my insurance. technically, I believe it would have been covered if i had gone through the process of talking to a therapist and getting a note that the surgery WOULD help confirm my gender, but i suspect it would have taken much longer, and I was afraid that my doctor and community resources would not have ended up approving me FOR the surgery since I don’t exactly fit the typical trans narrative. and luckily for me i had Massive, Spine-Bending G Cup Tiddies to contend with. so every doc that took a look at me said “yeah, you need those taken care of for medical reasons.” so i thought hey, let’s see how far this will get me!

- i talked to my primary care doc about my back pain and mentioned i’d like to look into a breast reduction, and she referred me to a local surgeon who could do the procedure. at the time i was still entertaining the idea of double-incision, but as it turned out, this surgeon just didnt do that. but i knew for certain my insurance would cover him, his results were good, and he was local, so i said yes to the T-incisions, which he said would likely get me down from a G to at least a C. it wasnt my ideal scenario admittedly, but frankly the back pain was getting to be too much, and i needed it to be addressed sooner rather than later.

- i had a consultation with the surgeon in early december, and they took pictures and measurements to send to my insurance so they could confirm the tits WERE in fact Too Bomb To Live. Doc said that it varies between insurance companies, but most will have a minimum amount of tissue that needs to be taken off, in grams, from each breast. he was like, “your insurance needs at least 1000g total removed, which’ll leave you on the small side, is that cool?” and i was like “My Man, take AS MUCH as you possibly can, im sick of these” and he was like “cool, makes my job easy then.”

- it took my insurance like 1.5 to 2 months to get back to me, but late january the surgery place called me and we set a date for february 5th, 2020!!

PRE-OP:

- before i went into surgery, the hospital made me go over my medical history with them over the phone, informed me of all the risks, and gave me a special scrub kit to shower with at home for the last 2 days before the surgery

- fun fact this soap will make your whole bathroom and body smell strongly and exactly like a hospital and it is gross as hell if you hate hospital smell

- i also had to go to my primary care doc to get the OK that i was healthy enough to go under general anesthesia, and also get some blood tests and a urinalysis done. i fucked up the urinalysis tho (which is a whole other story) so i had to redo that the morning of the surgery when i got to the hospital anyway.

- when i scheduled my surgery they also gave me a list of things i had to NOT DO before i went in. this included stuff like avoiding herbal medications and non-prescription supplements and not drinking any alcohol for like 2 weeks prior to surgery, and not eating anything after midnight the night before surgery.

- then it was SURGERY DAY!!!

- i went in with uhhh a LOT of anxiety about what everything would entail, ngl. i knew i had to do it because staring down the barrel of life with tiddies forever was way scarier than surgery, but yknow whenever you go under general anesthesia they legally do have to let you know that you could die and thats just a lot to consider, PLUS the whole thing involves just, really mangling your torso so like. its a lot! its okay to be scared!

- both my parents went with me for moral support which i appreciated a lot, but i didnt actually see them much since they had to spend a lot of it in the waiting room.

- when i went back with the doc they had me Wash The Tiddy Off with some antiseptic and change into a gown. i got some grippy socks out of the deal which is probably not a universal experience, but this hospital did it so shoutout to them for the socks i guess

- then they asked me all my medical history stuff again and checked me for any like, rashes or open sores or anything. i had some Tit Zits but they did not seem to be worried about that.

- then the surgeon came in and drew lines on me for the incisions. bro when i saw how high up my nips were gonna be i was losing my damn mind. this is one of the really exciting parts, because you finally get to really visualize what your end size is gonna be!!

- once he was satisfied with how everything looked, they started really Prepping Me For Surgery.

- they hooked me up to a blood pressure cuff, a heart monitor, and some compression leg thingies that would inflate and deflate intermittently around my calves to help me not get blood clots. this felt weird but tbh also like kind of a nice massage

- then the iv placement. bro im not lying when i tell you this is the worst part. the nurse numbed me with some lidocaine before placing the needle and let me tell you that shit HURTED. lidocaine Stings and Burns when it hits and this was arguably the most painful part. but the good news about that is it means nothing else after that is all that bad. and i got THREE lidocaine shots because these two nurses could NOT find my blood anywhere. they finally called in their ringer (an EMT named kirk, s/o to kirk) who got that sucker in my arm with NO numbing and NO pain in like, 2 fucking seconds. i pray you all have a kirk. kirk knows where your fucking blood is and hes not gonna fuck around getting to it because he JUST wrestled a drunk dude into an ambulance like an hour ago and compared to that this is nothing. kirk had sleeveless scrubs. im obsessed. anyway.

- then they put a plastic, inflatable, heated blanket over me? it was between two regular blankets so it wasnt as uncomfortable as you might imagine, but it was strange. warm tho so that was nice.

- THEN they wheeled my bed down to surgery. i was having so much anxiety at this point it was like... dreamlike. getting wheeled into the OR was just surreal. i was like, no thoughts head empty, just taking everything in.

- once i got there the surgical team was very cool about keeping me calm tho. they were playing their like, pump-up music and one of the guys was like “hey fyi about halfway thru the surgery we will be turning the lights off and having a rave, just in the interest of full disclosure. promise not to leave any glowsticks in there tho” and i was like what no i would LOVE glowstick tiddies

- i had to kinda roll from my bed onto the operating table, which was significantly harder and smaller. that kinda made things feel real, so i got a little more anxious at that point.

- to help me calm down they had me breathe in some straightup oxygen thru a mask while they hooked my iv to the fluids and such, and the guy was like “WHOA you got some lungs on you dude” and i was like yeah thanks im recovering from hyperventilating

- then they let the anesthesia into the iv, letting me know the whole time what was happening, talking to me until i was just OUT, which was not a lot of conversation time because i was out in like 5 seconds or less. they didnt make me count down or anything, but i promise you it was nigh instantaneous.

POST OP

- it really was instantaneous. i know everyone says that but it really is the truth, it feels like the whole thing takes seconds. like one moment youre laying there in the OR feeling the drugs Hit, and the next youre waking up in the little wake-up room feelin kinda groggy with a nurse talking to you, and youre still druggy so youre just rambling to her about how fucked your voice sounds right now and as soon as shes contented that youre basically lucid they start wheeling you to your room where youll ACTUALLY stay while you recover.

- THE THING I WAS THE LEAST PREPARED FOR WAS MY THROAT

- your throat will Hurt afterwards, but even more than that, you will be producing So Much Mucus. my surgery took about 2 hours and during that time, all my muscles were paralyzed by the anesthesia, including my lungs, so i was on a breathing tube. my throat, understandably, hated this, and started producing Gallons Of Fucking Mucus to protect itself. it then continued to do this for the next two days or so. the nurses were encouraging me to breathe deep and cough Hard to combat this, and avoid getting pneumonia, so i did. but THAT hurt the tiddies. it was really a vicious cycle. but its necessary because god if i had to have pneumonia on top of all the other recovery shit?? god. 0/10 wouldnt recommend. so it might hurt but dont worry your tiddies wont bust open or anything.

- i spent basically the rest of the day still hooked up to all the machines i listed earlier, PLUS a thing that would beep at me if my heart rate went too high, which it did a lot because i have anxiety, but luckily the nurses didnt seem too concerned. it really kept my breathing on track though because if i didnt breathe deep enough my heart would shoot up super fast and it’d beep and god that was just annoying and im pretty sure that was The Point. you kinda have to get used to breathing again, and the beeping trained me.

- they gave me like a bunch of crackers and a huge mug of water to work on at my leisure. i actually had lunch pretty quick after waking up? i know a lot of people have nausea issues from anesthesia but i didnt experience any of that. i DID move like a fucking sloth while i was eating tho. the pain meds and general grogginess of recovery slowed my whole body down sooooo much. my mom was actually like “are you okay??? like neurologically??????” and i was, totally, i was just. on slo-mo.

- anyway i didnt have to get catheterized for this procedure thankfully but they DID make me measure my pee every time i went to the bathroom. like i had to pee in a little bucket attached to the toilet and the nurse had to come check it every time and i felt really weird about that. so idk just be prepared for that i guess lmao

- also idk if it was the pain meds or the anesthesia itself but post-op, i couldnt shit for like a week. the constipation is real so get u some fucking laxatives asap when you get home, this is not a joke lmao

- they also had me put on a belt every time i got up so the nurse could hold onto me in case i decided to fucking biff it. they got me up a couple times throughout the day/night to walk up and down the hallway outside and get my body used to being upright again

- oh speaking of i never got to lie down completely flat, they had my bed locked at like a 30 degree angle minimum to help with... something. im not quite sure what, but im not gonna question it

- when i got up the next morning they had a couple nurses come in and help me un-bandage so i could shower and finally look at what the tiddies looked like for the first time!! and it was exciting but i didnt cry like i expected lmao i think i was too drained and too distracted by the bleeding

- the bleeding wasnt too bad actually, just little beads kinda coming out of parts of the incisions between the stitches. but once i got in the shower obviously stuff started getting diluted in the water and it looked like a lot more than there actually was, so dont be alarmed by that!

- SHOWERING: its a little complicated. youre not supposed to soak the incisions, and youre not supposed to apply direct water pressure or actually touch them at this point. so what i had to do was get a washcloth wet and soapy (with antibacterial soap, i think it was hand soap honestly. hand soap’s what ive been using at home so........) and then just kinda. squeeze it at your collarbone and let it drip down over everything kinda minimally. its kind of a process but it works fine. washing your hair and like, tbh literally everything else is gonna be hard. reaching over your head is hard and scary at this point. i will admit my hair care Suffered the first week.

- then i got bandaged back up and they got me back into my own clothes and ready to go home! they also put a bra on me over the bandages in my new size. i was only there for about 24 hours total, since i didnt really have any complications.

- on the ride home i had to make sure the cross-chest part of the seat belt was NOT touching me. if whoevers driving you hits a pothole, your soul WILL exit your body tits-first for a moment. im sorry if you live somewhere like here in nebraska where the roads are garbage but its not gonna be fun.

ONCE YOU’RE HOME!!

- i live at home with my mom and sister and if you live alone, id try to have a friend basically move in for the first week. you will need Help with things. basic things. you’ll mostly want to sleep because of the pain meds but those made me pretty dizzy so it was cool having my mom around in case i like. fell on the way to the bathroom and died or anything like that.

- changing bandages is really kind of a 2-person affair too, and youll have to do it at least once a day post-shower, so keep that in mind.

- the bleeding is like, not that bad after that first day honestly. i never had to change the bandages more than just the once per day.

- basically from here the procedure is just to take it easy, get up every few hours and walk around a little to keep the blood clots at bay, and enjoy yr new silhouette basically

- worst thing about recovery honestly? im a stomach/side sleeper, and i cant manage anything other than laying flat on my back with my arms at my sides right now, and thats just like.... idk i really cant sleep like that. its not comfy. ive had to set up kind of a pillow fort around me to keep me from rolling over in my sleep bc im afraid i might hurt myself accidentally like that, but idk how well-founded that fear is.

- i will say as someone who did have back problems before this, the difference is IMMEDIATE. i literally had better posture like Day 1. im still a little hunched over because the stitches create a bit of tension in your chest, but like literally it was instantaneous. god. once i got healed to a point that i could like, kinda relax and not be so fucking tense all the time? back pain has basically just been GONE.

- other fun things to notice: i had some pretty significant stretch marks before, and now they are running in a completely different direction. i crossed my arms over my chest the other day and they actually touched my torso for the first time in like, well over a decade. if i close my eyes and try to grab my tiddy from muscle memory, i stop like a full 3 inches from where my tit actually starts now. the size i am now, just like, freeballing it? this is how i looked when i wore a binder before. if i wore a binder now i imagine id be completely flat, and honestly if i layer up at this point you cant really tell that i have anything more than the average chubby dude’s moobs, which as a kinda chubby person is totally fine.

its a trip relearning what i look like and what im supposed to feel like but its just. such a fucking improvement over where i was. absolutely no regrets, regardless of how hard recovery has felt at times. anyway i hope this information is at least interesting and maybe helpful to anybody considering anything similar!!

#words #top surgery #breast reduction #info post #again yall lemme know if you have questions abt anything i didnt cover here i tried to hit all my bases but u never know #teat yeet

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localrealtor0 · 5 years

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Top Real Estate Agents In Mission Viejo

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trendingnewsb · 7 years

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Is the world really better than ever?

The long read: The headlines have never been worse. But an increasingly influential group of thinkers insists that humankind has never had it so good and only our pessimism is holding us back

By the end of last year, anyone who had been paying even passing attention to the news headlines was highly likely to conclude that everything was terrible, and that the only attitude that made sense was one of profound pessimism tempered, perhaps, by cynical humour, on the principle that if the world is going to hell in a handbasket, one may as well try to enjoy the ride. Naturally, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump loomed largest for many. But you didnt need to be a remainer or a critic of Trumps to feel depressed by the carnage in Syria; by the deaths of thousands of migrants in the Mediterranean; by North Korean missile tests, the spread of the zika virus, or terror attacks in Nice, Belgium, Florida, Pakistan and elsewhere nor by the spectre of catastrophic climate change, lurking behind everything else. (And all thats before even considering the string of deaths of beloved celebrities that seemed like a calculated attempt, on 2016s part, to rub salt in the wound: in the space of a few months, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Carrie Fisher and George Michael, to name only a handful, were all gone.) And few of the headlines so far in 2017 Grenfell tower, the Manchester and London attacks, Brexit chaos, and 24/7 Trump provide any reason to take a sunnier view.

Yet one group of increasingly prominent commentators has seemed uniquely immune to the gloom. In December, in an article headlined Never forget that we live in the best of times, the Times columnist Philip Collins provided an end-of-year summary of reasons to be cheerful: during 2016, he noted, the proportion of the worlds population living in extreme poverty had fallen below 10% for the first time; global carbon emissions from fossil fuels had failed to rise for the third year running; the death penalty had been ruled illegal in more than half of all countries and giant pandas had been removed from the endangered species list.

In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof declared that by many measures, 2016 was the best year in the history of humanity, with falling global inequality, child mortality roughly half what it had been as recently as 1990, and 300,000 more people gaining access to electricity each day. Throughout 2016 and into 2017, alongside Collins at the Times, the author and former Northern Rock chairman Matt Ridley the title of whose book The Rational Optimist makes his inclinations plain kept up his weekly output of ebullient columns celebrating the promise of artificial intelligence, free trade and fracking. By the time the professional contrarian Brendan ONeill delivered his own version of the argument, in the Spectator (Nothing better sums up the aloofness of the chattering class than their blathering about 2016 being the worst year ever) the viewpoint was becoming sufficiently well-entrenched that ONeill seemed in danger of forfeiting his contrarianism.

The loose but growing collection of pundits, academics and thinktank operatives who endorse this stubbornly cheerful, handbasket-free account of our situation have occasionally been labelled the New Optimists, a name intended to evoke the rebellious scepticism of the New Atheists led by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. And from their perspective, our prevailing mood of despair is irrational, and frankly a bit self-indulgent. They argue that it says more about us than it does about how things really are illustrating a certain tendency toward collective self-flagellation, and an unwillingness to believe in the power of human ingenuity. And that it is best explained as the result of various psychological biases that served a purpose on the prehistoric savannah but now, in a media-saturated era, constantly mislead us.

Once upon a time, it was of great survival value to be worried about everything that could go wrong, says Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian and self-declared New Optimist whose book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future was published just before Trump won the presidency last year. This is what makes bad news especially compelling: in our evolutionary past, it was a very good thing that your attention could be easily seized by negative information, since it might well indicate an imminent risk to your own survival. (The cave-dweller who always assumed there was a lion behind the next rock would usually be wrong but hed be much more likely to survive and reproduce than one who always assumed the opposite.) But that was all before newspapers, television and the internet: in these hyper-connected times, our addiction to bad news just leads us to vacuum up depressing or enraging stories from across the globe, whether they threaten us or not, and therefore to conclude that things are much worse than they are.

Really good news, on the other hand, can be a lot harder to spot partly because it tends to occur gradually. Max Roser, an Oxford economist who spreads the New Optimist gospel via his Twitter feed, pointed out recently that a newspaper could legitimately have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last 25 years. But none would have done so, because predictable daily events, by definition, arent newsworthy. And youll rarely see a headline about a bad event that failed to occur. But surely any judicious assessment of our situation ought to take into account all the wars, pandemics and natural disasters that might hypothetically have happened but didnt?

I used to be a pessimist myself, says Norberg, an urbane 43-year-old raised in Stockholm who is now a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington DC. I used to long for the good old days. But then I started reading history, and asking myself, well, where would I have been in those good old days, in my ancestors northern Sweden? I probably wouldnt have been anywhere. Life expectancy was too short. They mixed tree bark in the bread, to make it last longer!

In his book, Norberg canters through 10 of the most important basic indicators of human flourishing food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the state of the environment, literacy, freedom, equality and the conditions of childhood. And he takes special pleasure in squelching the fantasies of anyone inclined to wish they had been born a couple of centuries back: it wasnt so long ago, he observes, that dogs gnawed at the abandoned corpses of plague victims in the streets of European cities. As recently as 1882, only 2% of homes in New York had running water; in 1900, worldwide life expectancy was a paltry 31, thanks both to early adult death and rampant child mortality. Today, by contrast, its 71 and those extra decades involve far less suffering, too. If it takes you 20 minutes to read this chapter, Norberg writes at one point, in his own variation on the New Optimists favourite refrain, almost another 2,000 people will have risen out of [extreme] poverty currently defined as living on less than $1.90 per day.

These barrages of upbeat statistics seem intended to have the effect of demolishing the usual intractable political disagreements about the state of the planet. The New Optimists invite us to forget our partisan biases and tribal loyalties; to dispense with our cherished theories about what is wrong with the world and what should be done about it, and breathe, instead, the refreshing air of objective fact. The data doesnt lie. Just look at the numbers!

But numbers, it turns out, can be as political as anything else.

The New Optimists are certainly right on the nostalgia front: nobody in their right mind should wish to have lived in a previous century. In a 2015 survey for YouGov, 65% of British people (and 81% of the French) said they thought the world was getting worse but judged according to numerous sensible metrics, theyre simply wrong. People are indeed rising out of extreme poverty at an extraordinary rate; child mortality really has plummeted; standards of literacy, sanitation and life expectancy have never been higher. The average European or American enjoys luxuries medieval potentates literally couldnt have imagined. The essential finding of Steven Pinkers 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, a key reference text for the New Optimists, seems also to have been largely accepted: that we are living in historys most peaceful era, with violence of all kinds from deaths in war to schoolyard bullying in steep decline.

But the New Optimists arent primarily interested in persuading us that human life involves a lot less suffering than it did a few hundred years ago. (Even if youre a card-carrying pessimist, you probably didnt need convincing of that fact.) Nestled inside that essentially indisputable claim, there are several more controversial implications. For example: that since things have so clearly been improving, we have good reason to assume they will continue to improve. And further though this is a claim only sometimes made explicit in the work of the New Optimists that whatever weve been doing these past decades, its clearly working, and so the political and economic arrangements that have brought us here are the ones we ought to stick with. Optimism, after all, means more than just believing that things arent as bad as you imagined: it means having justified confidence that they will be getting even better soon. Rational optimism holds that the world will pull out of the current crisis, Ridley wrote after the financial crisis of 2007-8, because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialise honestly for the betterment of all I am a rational optimist: rational, because I have arrived at optimism not through temperament or instinct, but by looking at the evidence.

Illustration by Pete Gamlen

If all this were really true, it would suggest that an overwhelming proportion of the energy we dedicate to debating the state of humanity all the political outrage, the warnings of imminent disaster, the exasperated op-ed columns, all our anxiety and guilt about the misery afflicting people all over the world is wasted. Or, worse, it might be counterproductive, insofar as a belief that things are irredeemably awful seems like a bad way to motivate people to make things better, and thus in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here are the facts, wrote the American economist Julian Simon, whose vocal opposition to the gloomy predictions of environmentalists and population experts in the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for todays New Optimists. On average, people throughout the world have been living longer and eating better than ever before. Fewer people die of famine nowadays than in earlier centuries every single measure of material and environmental welfare in the United States has improved rather than deteriorated. This is also true of the world taken as a whole. All the long-run trends point in exactly the opposite direction from the projections of the doomsayers.

Those are the facts. So why arent we all New Optimists now?

Optimists have been telling doom-mongersto cheer up since at least 1710, when the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz concluded that ours must be the best of all possible worlds, on the grounds that God, being perfect and merciful, would hardly have created one of the more mediocre ones instead. But the most recent outbreak of positivity may be best understood as a reaction to the pessimism triggered by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. For one thing, those attacks were a textbook example of the kind of high-visibility bad news that activates our cognitive biases, convincing us that the world is becoming lethally dangerous when really it isnt: in reality, a slightly higher number of Americans were killed while riding motorcycles in 2001 than died in the World Trade Center and on the hijacked planes.

But the New Optimism is also a rejoinder to the kind of introspection that gained pace in the west after 9/11, and subsequently the Iraq war the feeling that, whether or not the new global insecurity was all our fault, it certainly demanded self-criticism and reflection, rather than simply a more strident assertion of the merits of our worldview. (The whole world hates us, and we deserve it, is how the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner derisively characterises this attitude.) On the contrary, the optimists insist, the data demonstrates that the global dominance of western power and ideas over the last two centuries has seen a transformative improvement in almost everyones quality of life. Matt Ridley likes to quote a predecessor of the contemporary optimists, the Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay: On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

The despondent self-criticism that frustrates the New Optimists is fuelled in part at least the way they see it by a kind of optical illusion in the way we think about progress. As Steven Pinker observes, whenever youre busy judging governments or economic systems for falling short of standards of decency, its all too easy to lose sight of how those standards themselves have altered over time. We are scandalised by reports of prisoners being tortured by the CIA but only thanks to the historically recent emergence of a general consensus that torture is beyond the pale. (In medieval England, it was a relatively unremarkable feature of the criminal justice system.) We can be appalled by the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean only because we start from the position that unknown strangers from distant lands are worthy of moral consideration a notion that would probably have struck most of us as absurd had we been born in 1700. Yet the stronger this kind of consensus grows, the more unconscionable each violation of it will seem. And so, ironically enough, the outrage you feel when you read the headlines is actually evidence that this is a magnificent time to be alive. (A recent addition to the New Optimist bookshelf, The Moral Arc by Michael Shermer, binds this argument directly to the optimists faith in science: it is scientific progress, he argues, that is destined to make us ever more ethical.)

The nagging suspicion that this argument is somehow based on a sleight of hand it would seem to permit any outrage to be reinterpreted as evidence of our betterment may lead you to another objection: even if its true that everything really is so much better than ever, why assume things will continue to improve? Improvements in sanitation and life expectancy cant prevent rising sea levels destroying your country. And its dangerous, more generally, to predict future results by past performance: view things on a sufficiently long timescale, and it becomes impossible to tell whether the progress the New Optimists celebrate is evidence of historys steady upward trajectory, or just a blip.

Almost every advance Norberg champions in his book Progress, for example, took place in the last 200 years a fact that the optimists take as evidence of the unstoppable potency of modern civilisation, but which might just as easily be taken as evidence of how rare such periods of progress are. Humans have been around for 200,000 years; extrapolating from a 200-year stretch seems unwise. We risk making the mistake of the 19th-century British historian Henry Buckle, who confidently declared, in his book History of Civilization in England, that war would soon be a thing of the past. That this barbarous pursuit is, in the progress of society, steadily declining, must be evident, even to the most hasty reader of European history, he wrote. It was 1857; Buckle seemed confident that the recently concluded Crimean war would be one of the last.

But the real concern here is not that the steady progress of the last two centuries will gradually swing into reverse, plunging us back to the conditions of the past; its that the world we have created the very engine of all that progress is so complex, volatile and unpredictable that catastrophe might befall us at any moment. Steven Pinker may be absolutely correct that fewer and fewer people are resorting to violence to settle their disagreements, but (as he would concede) it only takes a single angry narcissist in possession of the nuclear codes to spark a global disaster. Digital technology has unquestionably helped fuel a worldwide surge in economic growth, but if cyberterrorists use it to bring down the planets financial infrastructure next month, that growth might rather swiftly become moot.

The point is that if something does go seriously wrong in our societies, its really hard to see where it stops, says David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, who takes a less sanguine view of the future, and who has debated New Optimists such as Ridley and Norberg. The thought that, say, the next financial crisis, in a world as interconnected and algorithmically driven as our world, could simply spiral out of control that is not an irrational thought. Which makes it quite hard to be blithely optimistic. When you live in a world where everything seems to be getting better, yet it could all collapse tomorrow, its perfectly rational to be freaked out.

Runciman raises a related and equally troubling thought about modern politics, in his book The Confidence Trap. Democracy seems to be doing well: the New Optimists note that there are now about 120 democracies among the worlds 193 countries, up from just 40 in 1972. But what if its the very strength of democracy and our complacency about its capacity to withstand almost anything that augurs its eventual collapse? Could it be that our real problem is not an excess of pessimism, as the New Optimists maintain, but a dangerous degree of overconfidence?

According to this argument, the people who voted for Trump and Brexit didnt really do so because they had concluded their system was broken, and needed to be replaced. On the contrary: they voted as they did precisely because they had grown too confident that the essential security provided by government would always be there for them, whatever incendiary choice they made at the ballot-box. People voted for Trump because they didnt believe him, Runciman has written. They wanted Trump to shake up a system that they also expected to shield them from the recklessness of a man like Trump. The problem with this pattern delivering electoral shocks because youre confident the system can withstand them is that theres no reason to assume it can continue indefinitely: at some point, the damage may not be repairable. The New Optimists describe a world in which human agency doesnt seem to matter, because there are these evolved forces that are moving us in the right direction, Runciman says. But human agency does still matter human beings still have the capacity to mess it all up. And it may be that our capacity to mess it up is growing.

The optimists arent unaware of such risks but it is a reliable feature of the optimistic mindset that one can usually find an upbeat interpretation of the same seemingly scary facts. Youre asking, Am I the man who falls out of a skyscraper, and as he passes the second storey, says, So far, so good? Matt Ridley says. And the answer is, well, actually, in the past, people have foreseen catastrophe just around the corner and been wrong about it so often that this a relevant fact to take into account. History does seem to bear Ridley out. Then again, of course it does: if a civilisation-ending catastrophe had in fact occurred, you presumably wouldnt be reading this now. People who predict imminent catastrophes are usually wrong. On the other hand, they need only be right once.

If there is a single momentthat signalled the birth of the New Optimism, it was fittingly, somehow a TED talk, delivered in 2006 by the Swedish statistician and self-styled edutainer Hans Rosling, who died earlier this year. Entitled The best stats youve ever seen, Roslings talk summarised the results of an ingenious study he had conducted among Swedish university students. Presenting them with pairs of countries Russia and Malaysia, Turkey and Sri Lanka, and so on he asked them to guess which scored better on various measures of health, such as child mortality rates. The students reliably got it wrong, basing their answers on the assumption that countries closer to their own, both geographically and ethnically, must be better off.

But in fact Rosling had picked the pairs to prove a point: Russia had twice Malaysias child mortality, and Turkey twice that of Sri Lanka. Part of the defeatist mindset of the modern west, the way Rosling saw it, was the deeply ingrained assumption that we are living through times that are as good as theyre ever going to be and that the future we are bequeathing, to future generations and especially to the world beyond Europe and north America, can only be a disheartening one. Rosling enjoyed observing that if you had run this experiment on chimpanzees by labelling a banana with the name of each country and inviting them to pick one, they would have performed better than the students, since they would be right half the time, thanks to chance. Well-educated European humans, by contrast, get things far wronger than chance. We are not merely ignorant of the facts; we are actively convinced of depressing facts that arent true.

Its exhilarating to watch The best stats youve ever seen today partly because of Roslings nerdy, high-energy stage performance, but also because it seems to shine the bracing light of objective fact on questions usually mired in angry partisanship. Far more than when he delivered the talk, we live now in the Age of the Take, in which a seemingly infinite supply of blog posts, opinion columns, books and TV talking heads compete to tell us how to feel about the news. Most of this opinionising focuses less on stacking up hard facts in favour of an argument than it does on declaring what attitude you ought to adopt: the typical take invites you to conclude, say, that Donald Trump is a fascist, or that he isnt, or that BBC presenters are overpaid, or that your yoga practice is an instance of cultural appropriation. (This shouldnt really come as a surprise: the internet economy is fuelled by attention, and its far easier to seize someones attention with emotionally charged argument than mere information plus you dont have to pay for the expensive reporting required to ferret out the facts.) The New Optimists promise something different: a way to feel about the state of the world based on the way it really is.

Illustration by Pete Gamlen

But after steeping yourself in their work, you begin to wonder if all their upbeat factoids really do speak for themselves. For a start, why assume that the correct comparison to be making is the one between the world as it was, say, 200 years ago, and the world as it is today? You might argue that comparing the present with the past is stacking the deck. Of course things are better than they were. But theyre surely nowhere near as good as they ought to be. To pick some obvious examples, humanity indisputably has the capacity to eliminate extreme poverty, end famines, or radically reduce human damage to the climate. But weve done none of these, and the fact that things arent as terrible as they were in 1800 is arguably beside the point.

Ironically, given their reliance on cognitive biases to explain our predilection for negativity, the New Optimists may be in the grip of one themselves: the anchoring bias, which describes our tendency to rely too heavily on certain pieces of information when making judgments. If you start from the fact that plague victims once languished in the streets of European cities, its natural to conclude that life these days is wonderful. But if you start from the position that we could have eliminated famines, or reversed global warming, the fact that such problems persist may provoke a different kind of judgment.

The argument that we should be feeling happier than we are because life on the planet as a whole is getting better, on average, also misunderstands a fundamental truth about how happiness works: our judgments of the world result from making specific comparisons that feel relevant to us, not on adopting what David Runciman refers to as the view from outer space. If people in your small American town are far less economically secure than they were in living memory, or if youre a young British person facing the prospect that you might never own a home, its not particularly consoling to be told that more and more Chinese people are entering the middle classes. At book readings in the US midwest, Ridley recalls, audience members frequently questioned his optimism on the grounds that their own lives didnt seem to be on an upward trajectory. Theyd say, You keep saying the worlds getting better, but it doesnt feel like that round here. And I would say, Yes, but this isnt the whole world! Are you not even a little bit cheered by the fact that really poor Africans are getting a bit less poor? There is a sense in which this is a fair point. But theres another sense in which its a completely irrelevant one.

At its heart, the New Optimism is an ideological argument: broadly speaking, its proponents are advocates for the power of free markets, and they intend their sunny picture of humanitys recent past and imminent future to vindicate their politics. This is a perfectly legitimate political argument to make but its still a political argument, not a straightforward, neutral reliance on objective facts. The claim that we are living in a golden age, and that our dominant mood of pessimism is unwarranted, is not an antidote to the Age of the Take, but a Take like any other and it makes just as much sense to adopt the opposite view. What I dislike, Runciman says, is this assumption that if you push back against their argument, what youre saying is that all these things are not worth valuing For people to feel deeply uneasy about the world we inhabit now, despite all these indicators pointing up, seems to me reasonable, given the relative instability of the evidence of this progress, and the [unpredictability] that overhangs it. Everything really is pretty fragile.

Johan Norberg, who launched his book Progress two months before the US presidential election, watched the results come in on a foggy morning in Stockholm, at a party organised by the American embassy. As Trumps victory became a certainty, the atmosphere turned from one of rumbling alarm to horrified disbelief. We were all Swedes in the media, politics, business and so on I think it would have been hard to find a single person there who had hoped for a Trump win so pretty soon the mood was going downhill dramatically, Norberg recalled. And whats more, they didnt have any alcohol, which didnt help, because everyone was saying: We need something strong here! But they had it more set up like a breakfast thing. He smiled. I think Americans dont really understand Swedes.

The populist surges of the last two years in the US and Britain powering the rise of Trump, the Brexit vote, and the unpredicted levels of support for Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn pose a complicated problem for the New Optimists. On the one hand, its easy enough to characterise such anger directed toward political establishments as a mistake, based on a failure to perceive how well things are going; or as a legitimate reaction to real, but localised and temporary bumps in the road, which neednt constitute any larger argument for pessimism. On the other hand, it is a curious view of the world that sees such political waves solely as responses, mistaken or otherwise, to the real situation. They are part of that real situation. Even if you think that Trump supporters, say, were wholly in error to perceive their situation negatively, the perception itself was real enough and they really did elect Trump, with all his potential for destabilisation. (The New Optimists, says David Runciman, think of politics as nothing more than an annoyance, because in their view the things that drive progress are not political. But the things that drive failure are political.) There is a point at which it stops being so relevant whether widespread pessimism and anxiety can be justified or not, and becomes more relevant simply that it is widespread.

Norberg is no Trump supporter, and the election result might have seemed like a setback to an author promoting a book painting humanitys immediate future as entirely rosy. In it, he does warn that progress isnt inevitable: There is a real risk of a nativist backlash, he writes. When we dont see the progress we have made, we begin to search for scapegoats for the problems that remain. But it is in the nature of the New Optimism that negative developments can be alchemised into reasons to be cheerful, and by the time we spoke, Norberg had an upbeat spin on the election, too.

I think it might be that in a couple of years time, well think it was a great thing that Trump won, he says. Because if hed lost, and Hillary had won, shed have been the most hated president of modern times, and then Trump and Bannon would have used that to build an alt-right media empire, create an avalanche of hatred, and then there might have been a more disciplined candidate the next time round a real fascist, rather than someone impersonating Trump may prove to have been the incompetent, self-absorbed person who ruins the populist brand in the United States. This sort of counterfactual argument suffers from not being falsifiable, and in any case, its a long way from a position of straightforward positivity about the direction in which the world is moving. But perhaps it is the one genuinely indisputable truth on which the New Optimists and the more pessimistically minded can agree: that whatever happens, things could always, in principle, have been worse.

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