Not everything is bleak, there are simple joys out there

This morning I walked the dog and listened to radio, as I often do. There was this lady in the news fragment on Deutschlandfunk Kultur giving a “bad rapport” (Zeugnis) to Western countries on Corona. In a call-in she enumerated all the bad stuff which (allegedly) went wrong. And I listen in disbelief: all those are just imperfections to me, but all in all we are doing well, dear lady!

The other day, I spoke a friend who tried to convince me that social networks are all bad and he’s quitting Facebook. I tried to point out that there’s a lot of good stuff happening thanks to social nets too, it’s just the small stuff we do not read in the news about, but which is often way more important than the “big” failings of our societies. Again, imperfections all around, but all in all I try to see a positive vector of development in the long-run.

Another friend expects European Union to go down the drain soon, especially because of the economic issues. I repeatedly fail to convince him that of course things are not perfect, but in general there’s more robustness and positive developments than all teh negative.

Maybe I am just a naive, overly optimistic bloke somewhere. Dunno. But I can tell you what cheers me up on Saturday morning. Reading the society & lifestyle column in The Guardian, especially the Blind Date section (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/feb/13/blind-date-steph-will). It’s so nice to see people opening up about what is positive and good about each other. This is perhaps silly habit of mine, I am well beyond “blind dating” age and stage of life (but who knows!), what I like is to get a weekly dose of positive humanity from there. People genuinely try hard to be good to each other and find joy in each other’s presence. Not everything is bleak out there! Actually, to the contrary!