Exactly. Every people in their own time considers their time as the most important, crucial and urgent. they consider past times as less important.

If you observe this then you can see that in the future people will look back at now and think the same. history tells us the same thing. it's human nature to think that doom and gloom now is much worse than before, simply because we are in this moment and without perspective.

But that's not what GP was saying.

We, today, have the ability to dictate what others tomorrow over- or under-appreciate as doom and gloom. Whether there is a cognitive dissonance is irrelevant, but what actually happens is very much only avoidable going forward, not looking back.

In the same context, The debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Matt Riddley is an interesting one http://www.munkdebates.com/debates/progress

The problem would be even higher by a seemingly dormant disease agent, which first infects nearly all of humanity and then wents time delayed into action.

Nobody suspects the flue.