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Originally Posted by Elspode
That's the position I usually take. I think life has *always* been scary. We've just gotten more efficient at gathering and reporting the scary parts.
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Or the flip-side way of looking at is, life has always been not so dangerous. Who knows if the odds of getting kidnapped etc. have gone up or down since the "good old days". But the odds of *hearing* about a terrible crime have gone way, way up.
We're evolved to take news as evidence. 1000 years ago, you only heard about events that happened in your village. If you heard about one kidnapping a month, things really were VERY unsafe. But now if you hear about one kidnapping a month, that's one kidnapping in the entire U.S. But yet it still feels like the same evidence of danger, so we don't let our kids play outside, etc.