If you want to feel a bit happier about all of the sad things out there, check out the “Pessimists Archive.” Things have always been shitty.

For example, you will learn that people were panicked about the fact that the development of new machines would cause mass unemployment. This was back in the 1920’s, when those new machines included the horseless carriage.

And I learned how typewriters were once seen as a big sexual turn-off:

A love letter written with a typewriter today would be considered a romantic gesture, however in 1906 they were called the most “cold-blooded, mechanical, unromantic production imaginable” by one writer.