Imagine you went back in time to 1950. What would you tell the people about our time? What would you tell them had changed? Now here is the more difficult part: what would you tell them had improved? 
    You might think that is a very easy question to answer. Television is one thing that has obviously improved. Instead of a tiny black & white screen with static filled pictures on only three or four channels, we now have full color, high-definition, and hundreds of channels, at least if you have cable or satellite. And computers. Instead of filling up a room the size of an average house, a computer now fits in your pocket and does a lot more. And don't forget the tiny cell phones we carry around with us.
But those things are all technological advancements, not necessarily improvements. An improvement is something that makes life better for us. Not easier or cheaper or more cluttered: better. Can we really say that our lives have become better in the past 60 years? 
    Perhaps in the area or medicine, we can say that doctors and researchers have found cures and treatments for many illnesses that plagued us back in the forties and fifties. But at the same time, new diseases like AIDS and anorexia have cropped up so we are not living significantly healthier or longer than we did back than. 
    What about education, haven't we made great strides there with a much higher percentage of the population completing high school and college? That depends on what they are learning. It seems that colleges and universities, which back then were considered something for only the wealthy and very smart, have very much lowered their standards in order to get more students. They also have ended largely ended the idea of students studying what they find interesting and what they are talented at to being really just technical schools that teach the job skills the students will need to get a good job. They even work closely with major corporations in developing curriculum so they will be teaching what the corporations want the students to learn. Is that really what college is for?
    Then we can look at the area of spirituality. At first glance, it would seem like we are failing there as well. Back in 1950, nearly everybody belonged to a church and attended regularly. Now I would guess that probably less than half of the population attends a church regularly and many are openly atheists. That, however, is only part of the story. At the same time that the conventional churches that have long ago lost their way, many new churches and spiritual schools have brought back the true teachings of Jesus, Buddha and the others. Of course, many of these new churches are just as phony, if not more so, than the major churches that have become more social clubs than institutes for spiritual growth, but there are real ones and they are growing in strength and membership. A writer on spiritual matters and applied kinesiology, who's name I unfortunately have forgotten, developed a scale for measuring human spiritual development levels of an individual or a group. His scale indicates that, over the last few decades, the spiritual level of the United States and the human race as a whole has been increasing. So there is hope for us after all.