Doom and Gloom

Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Bring Out Your Dead
Bitz-O-Funny
The news seems to be all bad, all the time. Count your blessings cupcake, things could be much worse. From page 200 of The Verge:

I knew the plague killed a bunch of people during the middle ages, and I sort of knew there was a period when the weather was considerably colder for a while, but I didn't realize they happened at the same time.

But around 1500 things started picking up, people got a handle on what you could do with money and the printing press appeared. Things started changing, and the changes became ever more rapid. Two hundred years later, a watchmaker in London is lamenting that he gave up the trade because he got tired of keeping up with all the technical advances being made in his trade.