Was 2025 the World's Worst Year Ever? |
I fear this post might make me feel a bit better by creating the illusion that I am writing something useful—being useful to others. But here goes.
Writing on New Year’s Day 2026, I feel the need to try to make some sense of the worst year of my 73-year life. I don’t mean worse personally. My close family and I live in the relative safety and affluence of London, England, and we are all healthy and have fulfilling jobs. I mean, worst in the global sense.
When people ask, ‘How are you, John? ’ I usually reply, ‘Well, as long as I don’t think about the world, I’m doing okay, I guess.’
I have spent most of my life feeling that the world, in general, has been continuing its centuries-long struggle, albeit often two steps forward and one step back, towards better lives for most people, and more rights for disadvantaged and oppressed groups. But the last decade or so has felt different, and this year has been truly depressing and frightening, in equal measure.
You will have your own top list of horrors. As of this moment (there are so many more to choose from), mine are:
If I were allowed another, it would be the national equivalent of shooting oneself in both feet: Brexit and its disastrous, predictable, ongoing aftermath.
How do we understand all of this? How do we remain hopeful? How do we find something to do that might make things better in some small way? What can an aging clinical psychologist contribute, if anything?
I have busied myself, for the past two years, with designing, disseminating, and analysing the results of an international survey of people who have had electroconvulsive