The slightly more troubling answer is that even though the world is not fundamentally in worse shape in 2023 than in 1993, we know so much more about it, and see so much more of its irredeemable ugliness, it just takes a lot more work to maintain worldly-yet-carefree attitude…
The third and most troubling answer is that the world has _actually _slipped out of our grasp and into an ungovernable downward trajectory. That it’s not just that we hear more of the bad news, but that there _is _more bad news. And our growing collective agency is no longer staying comfortably ahead of our growing collective problems.
If humour is one lens though which we see our world more clearly, the corrective power required of that lens seems to have grown substantially over this last generation.