Quotes About Progress

Despite what we hear on the news and from many authorities, the great story of our era is that we are witnessing the greatest improvement in global living standards ever to take place. Poverty,

Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.

O who knows what slumbers in the background of the times?

Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.

Tristan [Harris] believes that what we are seeing is 'the collective downgrading of humans and the upgrading of machines'. We are becoming less rational, less intelligent, less focused.

One friend told me that she always knew her depression was lifting when she felt her sense of time expanding again

We are now exposed to ten times the amount of artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.

It's always tempting to mistake your personal decline for the decline of the human species

Every single person reading this is the beneficiary of big civilizing social changes that seemed impossible when somebody first proposed them.

The way we work seems fixed and unchangeable - until it changes, and then we realise it didn't have to be like that in the first place.

One study of depressed people in Norway found that a program like this moved people on average 4.5 points on the depression scale—more than double the effect of chemical antidepressants.

it has to begin with a bit of introspection, with a bit of understanding ourselves." Yes, he says, the environment changed: "You [the average tech user] didn't make the iPhone. It's not your fault. I never said it's your fault. I'm saying it's your responsibility. This stuff isn't going away. In some form or other, it's here to stay. What choice do we have? We have to adapt. That's our only option.

The web, by contrast, is "less than ten thousand days old.

To have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it," Mihaly has explained. "We also need a positive goal; otherwise why keep going?

Nada tiene que quedarse como está. Si un dogma no funciona, por muy fuerte e inamovible que parezca, siempre puede uno desecharlo y plantear algo distinto.

In 1975 the average American had a blood lead level of 15 micrograms per deciliter. Today it's 0.85 micrograms per deciliter.

Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more.

So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities.

Many Silicon Valley insiders predicted that it would only get worse. One of its most famous investors, Paul Graham, wrote: "Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years than it did in the last forty.

We could have looked instead at what does work: changing the environment in specific ways.

As a society, we are dreaming less and less.

The British writer Robert Colville says we are living through "the Great Acceleration," and like Sune, he argues it's not simply our tech that's getting faster—it's almost everything. There's evidence that a broad range of important factors in our lives really are speeding up: people talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s, and in just twenty years, people have started to walk 10 percent faster in cities.

In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that's a little bit difficult.

It might look discouraging , but at every relapse, you learn something new.