The Netherlands Is Better Than It Feels

The Netherlands is doing much better than it feels.

That sentence sounds almost offensive now. Say it in public and people immediately reach for the exceptions. Housing. Migration. Healthcare pressure. Energy bills. Obesity. Distrust. Crime. Polarization. The general sense that something is off.

Some of those worries are real. That matters. A country can improve on the dashboard and still feel less livable in the nervous system of its people.

But if we cannot hold the facts of progress, we lose contact with reality in another direction. We become rich people telling each other poverty stories. We live inside one of the most successful societies human beings have ever built and train ourselves to experience it as collapse.

That is not intelligence.

It is fear with a spreadsheet allergy.

The numbers are not subtle

Compare the Netherlands around 1990 with the Netherlands now.

• Recorded crime: according to CBS StatLine, police registered 1,235,480 crimes in 1990, or 83 per 1,000 inhabitants. In 2024, that was 815,940 crimes, or 45 per 1,000 inhabitants. Property crimes fell from 60 per 1,000 inhabitants to 26.
• Life expectancy: World Bank data shows Dutch life expectancy rose from 76.9 years in 1990 to 82.0 years in 2024.
• Child mortality: deaths under age five fell from 8.3 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 3.9 in 2024, according to the World Bank.
• Unemployment: the World Bank's modeled ILO series starts in 1991 for the Netherlands. It shows unemployment at 7.3% in 1991 and 3.7% in 2024.
• Income: real GDP per person, adjusted for purchasing power, rose from about $43,100 in 1990 to about $70,500 in 2024, using constant international dollars.
• Poverty: the newer CBS poverty method does not give a clean 1990 comparison, but the recent trend is still striking. CBS reports poverty fell from 7.1% of the population in 2018 to 3.1% in 2023. Child poverty fell from 8.6% to 3.6%.
• Smoking: Trimbos reports that adult smoking fell from 25.7% in 2014 to 19.0% in 2023. The longer World Bank tobacco-use series shows a drop from 34.5% in 2000 to 21.3% in 2022.
• Education: CBS reports that the share of people aged 15 to 74 with HBO or university education rose from 28.3% in 2013 to 36.4% in 2023. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, it was 54.2% in 2023.
• Renewable energy: the Netherlands was barely renewable in 1990. World Bank data puts renewable energy consumption at 1.2% of total final energy consumption in 1990. CBS puts gross final renewable energy consumption at 20.18% in 2024. Renewable electricity consumption reached about 46% of total electricity consumption in 2023, according to the Environmental Data Compendium.

This is not a minor improvement.

It is a transformation.

We are safer, richer, longer-lived, better educated, less exposed to childhood death, less likely to smoke, less likely to be unemployed and far more capable of producing clean electricity than the country of 1990.

And yet many people feel the opposite.

Why better does not feel better

The easy answer is that people are ungrateful.

I do not buy that.

People are not wrong to feel strain. Averages do not pay rent. GDP per capita does not give a young family a house. A lower national crime rate does not comfort the shop owner dealing with intimidation. Renewable percentages do not remove the absurdity of grid congestion. Longer life expectancy does not make healthcare feel calm when every system seems overloaded.

So yes, the facts of progress do not cancel the facts of pressure.

But the reverse is also true. The facts of pressure do not cancel the facts of abundance.

We have become very good at the first half of realism and very bad at the second. We can name every failure, but struggle to feel any achievement. We know how to distrust official optimism, but we rarely distrust our own appetite for decline.

The bad feels more true.

That is not because the bad is always more real. It is because the bad arrives with adrenaline. Fear has better distribution than progress. A stabbing, a scandal, a viral clip, a broken institution, a furious comment section: these enter the body immediately. They tighten the chest. They demand a story.

Progress is quieter. Nobody feels a national dopamine hit because under-five mortality is now half what it was in 1990. Nobody opens champagne because property crime per 1,000 inhabitants fell from 60 to 26. Nobody gathers the family around the kitchen table to celebrate a long-term reduction in smoking.

Progress becomes plumbing.

It only becomes visible when it breaks.

The comments are the essay

That is why the reaction to positive data is so revealing.

Show people that the Netherlands has improved on crime, health, education, poverty and energy, and the comments will often say: fake numbers, migration, taxes, cancer, obesity, housing, corrupt government, open your eyes.

Some of those replies point to real problems. Some are pure reflex. But together they reveal something deeper than politics.

We are addicted to the emotional status of seeing through things.

To say "everything is getting worse" feels awake. To say "look at the data, many things have improved" feels naive. Pessimism has become a badge of seriousness. Gratitude feels like surrender. Optimism feels like propaganda.

Hans Rosling spent much of his life fighting exactly this reflex. In Factfulness, he argued that people consistently misunderstand the world because our instincts are shaped by fear, gaps, negativity and drama. We notice what screams. We miss what compounds.

Max Roser of Our World in Data puts the mature version beautifully: the world is awful, the world is much better, and the world can be much better. All three are true at the same time.

That frame matters because it protects us from two childish mistakes.

The first mistake is denial: everything is fine, stop complaining.

The second mistake is despair: everything is broken, burn it down.

A serious adult society rejects both.

Abundance became boring

The deeper issue is not that the Netherlands lacks abundance.

The deeper issue is that abundance became normal.

Clean drinking water. Hot showers. Vaccines. Safe childbirth. Antibiotics. Schools. Pensions. Public transport. Libraries. Supermarkets full of food from everywhere. A phone in your pocket with access to more knowledge than any university library had in 1990. A welfare state that, however imperfect, catches millions of blows that used to destroy families.

These are not small things.

They are civilizational miracles that became household background noise.

A person in 1990 did not live in a primitive world. The Netherlands was already rich and stable. But the difference between then and now is still enormous. We carry more medical capacity, more knowledge, more connectivity, more choice, more safety infrastructure, more education and more wealth than that country did.

And still the mood often says: decline.

Part of this is social media. Part of it is the news business. Part of it is politics, where fear is a more reliable mobilizer than gratitude. Part of it is the human nervous system, which evolved to notice threat faster than stability.

But part of it is moral laziness.

It is easier to resent abundance than to steward it.

If everything is terrible, we owe the world only anger. If life is historically abundant and still imperfect, we owe it responsibility.

Gratitude is not complacency

This is where many people become nervous.

If we admit that life has improved, will we stop fixing what is broken?

No. We might finally fix it from a healthier place.

Gratitude is not the enemy of critique. Gratitude keeps critique honest. Without gratitude, critique rots into resentment. With gratitude, critique becomes stewardship.

Look at housing. It is a real failure. Young people are right to feel betrayed when a rich country cannot make home ownership or affordable rent feel attainable. But the solution is not to pretend the entire country is collapsing. The solution is to build, permit, finance and govern with the seriousness of a country that knows what it has inherited.

Look at healthcare. Pressure is real. Waiting lists are real. Staff shortages are real. But a country where life expectancy is about 82 years is not a failed civilization. It is a successful civilization facing the second-order problems of success: aging, cost, complexity, expectations.

Look at energy. Grid congestion is absurd and should make us angry. But the fact that renewable electricity went from statistical noise in 1990 to a major share of Dutch electricity is not nothing. It proves that change can happen. The next task is not despair. It is execution.

The same pattern holds everywhere.

The facts do not say: stop worrying.

They say: worry more accurately.

Fear is a bad operating system

A society that cannot feel its own progress becomes easy to manipulate.

If people believe everything is worse, they will accept almost any story that offers someone to blame. Foreigners. Elites. Brussels. Farmers. Climate activists. Capitalists. Socialists. The young. The old. The media. The state. The market.

There is always a villain available.

But abundance requires a different psychology. It requires memory. It asks us to remember what life used to be like, not romantically, but factually. It asks us to compare with history before declaring collapse. It asks us to notice that many of our current problems are not signs of total failure, but signs of systems that succeeded enough to create new tensions.

That does not make those tensions fake.

It makes them solvable.

Fear says: everything is broken.

Abundance says: look how much has already been built. Now build better.

The first mood produces rage. The second produces agency.

The mature view

The Netherlands is not paradise.

Housing is too scarce. Trust in institutions has been damaged. Migration and integration require more honesty than polite politics usually allows. Obesity is a genuine public health problem. Mental strain is real. The energy transition needs far more execution and less procedural theater. Some neighborhoods do not feel safe even if the national average improved.

All true.

But another thing is also true.

The Netherlands of today is vastly more abundant than the Netherlands of 1990. The facts are not even close. We have gained years of life, reduced child mortality, lowered crime per inhabitant, increased real income, reduced poverty in recent years, educated more people and built an energy system that is finally shifting at scale.

If we cannot say that out loud, we are not being critical.

We are being possessed by decline.

Truth is not the same as bad news. In Truth Is Not a Thought, I wrote that truth is contact with what is actually here. The body. The consequence. The customer. The road. The world that pushes back.

That includes the wound.

It also includes the miracle.

We need a fact-based gratitude. Not soft optimism. Not government brochure positivity. Not "be happy with what you have" as a way to silence legitimate anger.

Something stronger.

The ability to look at the numbers, admit that life has become dramatically better, and then ask what kind of courage abundance now demands from us.

Because abundance is not the end of responsibility.

It is the beginning of a higher one.