The good news the headlines missed in 2025
It’s our good-news Friday, and waiting for us is a year-end essay by our friend Angus at Australia’s Fix the News. Here are a few excerpts:
“We published 38 editions of our newsletter this year, featuring 1,932 stories from 170 countries, and what we found was that while the headlines kept insisting on collapse, the data — child mortality rates, vaccination coverage, emissions intensity, deforestation curves — kept showing stubborn progress. While everyone was staring in horror at the flames outside the capsule, we were looking at telemetry that said there was more than enough oxygen to make it home.
“This gap, between the world as it is and how we’re told to see it, comes down to a choice about what we do with our attention. Mission control doesn’t ignore danger. It’s acknowledged, monitored, taken seriously. But knowing which emergencies require immediate action means you need to watch all the instruments, not just the alarms. That’s the difference between panic and an effective response.
“Every year, Gallup surveys around 1,000 people each in 142 countries, asking about their lives and expectations. In its most recent edition, 33 percent of respondents said they were thriving, the highest proportion on record. The share who said they were suffering dropped to 7 percent, matching the lowest level since tracking began in 2007. A decade ago it was 12 percent.
“You might expect these numbers to feature prominently in coverage about the state of the world. They don’t. A record four in five people are satisfied with their personal freedoms and three in four say their country is a good place for children to learn and grow. Economic optimism has rebounded to its highest point since the financial crisis. More people in more countries report living better lives than at any point since measurements began.”
“While American and British media spent a lot of this year focusing on sinister political forces and affordability crises, in much of the rest of the world people felt measurably better about their prospects. Not because growth was spectacular (it wasn’t) but because daily life kept improving in ways that GDP doesn’t capture.”
“We have built the safest civilization in human history while convincing ourselves that we live in the most dangerous. Billions of people experienced measurable improvements in health, safety, and material conditions in 2025. That progress didn’t make the news. But it happened anyway, one vaccine, one school meal, one kilowatt-hour at a time.”
Thank you, Angus, for helping us refocus our Spaceship Earth journey. We wish you all a wonderful Southern Hemisphere summer break and look forward to your return.
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