Reading your piece I’m reminded of the epic disaster movies of my youth. As soon as the airplane starts to go down, or the boat starts to sink, you could count on at least one character screaming, ‘We’re all doomed!’

Hollywood being what it then was you could always count on another character telling the first, in effect, ‘Sit down, bud, you’re not helping.’

That’s what I’m saying to this piece and your scream of doom and gloom. Sit down. When you have something constructive to say, please, stand up and say it. Absolutely.

In the meantime, get some perspective! Maybe watch an episode of the Great British Baking Show. Pablum for the masses you might call it, but also perhaps a suitable antidote—humans happily helping each other while competing against each other, go figure—to what you write in this piece, which I call anti-pablum for the masses.

Some 2,400 years ago Socrates walked the earth. As he contemplated his life and his world he could look back across 2,000 years of human civilization to wonder what it would have been like to be there to watch the pyramids rise from the desert sands of Egypt.

Perspective. It’s a real thing.