Are We Living in the Best of Times, or the Worst of Times?

An honest debate.

The winner of this year’s The Will Leitch Newsletter women’s basketball pool was “RSpuhler.” That winning entry, which as you will remember comes with the reward of an assigned newsletter topic, came from Robert Spuhler.

Here is what Robert asked me to write about:

I’m sure you’ve written about this at some point in the past, and if it feels repetitive, let me know, but here’s what I’ve got. Over the last number of weeks I’ve had the chance to hangout with a few out-of-town friends of mine who were visiting Los Angeles and, over a drink or two, the conversation so often comes around to how this moment feels so existentially unsettled. I thought it was just me, as a writer holding on to his profession by a thread (while supplementing income via tutoring) and watching private equity essentially tell me that the thing I’ve trained myself to do since fifth grade is surplus to requirements. But one is in marketing and has his eye trained on his company’s stock price as if it was a capitalist Sword of Damocles, and my other friend sees a gridlocked political system that passively accept homelessness, disease, and war, and worries that a breaking point is coming.

Do you think this is a particularly unsettled time? Or is that feeling tied to…