The longer your time horizon, the more calamities and disasters you’ll experience. Baseball player Dan Quisenberry once said, “The future is much like the present, only longer.”

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says people don’t really communicate on social media so much as they perform for one another.

In modern times our horizons cover every nation, culture, political regime, and economy in the world.

The big takeaway here is that we really have no idea what policies we’ll be pushing for in, say, five or ten years. Unexpected hardship makes people do and think things they’d never imagine when things are calm. Your personal views fall into the same trap. In investing, saying “I will be greedy when others are fearful” is easier said than done,

But people don’t remember the world when they were born. They remember the last few months, when progress is always invisible.

Your happiness depends on your expectations more than anything else. So in a world that tends to get better for most people most of the time, an important life skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. It’s also one of the hardest.

The point, then, isn’t that you should read less news and more books. It’s that if you read good books you’ll have an easier time understanding what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to in the news.

We tend to take every precaution to safeguard our material possessions because we know what they cost. But at the same time we neglect things which are much more precious because they don’t come with price tags attached: The real value of things like our eyesight or relationships or freedom can be hidden to us, because money is not changing hands.

Electrification also surged in the 1930s, particularly to rural Americans left out of the urban electrification of the 1920s.