Doomslayer: 1,084 Reasons the World Isn’t Falling Apart

A list of all the good news we collected this year.

In a Gallup poll from last January, around one-fifth of Americans reported being satisfied with how things are going in the country. Just four percent were very satisfied.

It’s not a surprising finding for anyone who goes outside and talks to people. This Christmas, I attended a community potluck, a place where you might expect to find an unusually sociable and well-adjusted crowd. Snow was falling, the fire was crackling, children were frolicking, and still, the conversation turned intractably toward all that’s going wrong in the world (the main culprits at this New England gathering were identified as “a lack of empathy” and “artificial intelligence”).

That same poll, however, found that over 80 percent of Americans were satisfied with their own lives. Obviously, those results are in contradiction; a country cannot be doing that poorly if a supermajority of its citizens are having an excellent time. That contradiction is also a highly replicated psychological finding. Across developed countries, people are consistently pessimistic about the state of society in general, yet optimistic about their own lives.

Part of the gap is thanks to the media. News outlets compete for our attention by writing increasingly negative headlines, which are more likely to be clicked and shared on social media. Some is also due to human nature. The media is not conspiring against us, but simply indulging our innate preference for negative news and susceptibility to anecdotes over statistics, which tend to be more optimistic.

That last point is the reason for the list below, which contains 1,084 good news stories we collected in 2025. More precisely, it exists so that when people at your local potluck ask, “How can you be so optimistic? Don’t you read the news?”, you can refer them to a barrage of anecdotal evidence that the world is not, in fact, falling apart. I also urge you to scroll through it yourself; it will leave you calmer, more cheerful, and better informed.

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