It wasn’t like 1914. Now that was an awful year.

But 2014, a century after the outbreak of the First World War, certainly was a sobering 365 days.

It ended as the sort of year where personal successes or situations seemed diminished by what went on in the wider world.

Like, it is fine to consider the 52 weeks of 2014, and if they went well for you … well, great. But you may want to weigh your own 2014 satisfaction against what seemed like a bigger portion of misery than we have (almost) become accustomed to, in a wired world.

Let’s see if we can summarize the bad news of the year past.

–The Ebola outbreak in west Africa. So far it has been pretty well contained there, but the high rate of death among those who come down with it … freaked out a lot of people.

–Russia returning to its expansionist past by seizing the Crimea, previously a part of the Ukraine — where an unpopular president had been overthrown. Which led to more tension between Russia and the West than we have seen in 20-plus years.

–Three passenger aircraft going off the grid. One shot down over Ukraine by … somebody. One that just disappeared off the radar and has not been found. And a third that went down just the other day, in the Java Sea, perhaps because of pilot error, perhaps because of something more sinister. And we should not discount the “following it though I don’t really want to know” aspect of plane crashes. We all have flown, and we feel vulnerable in that metal tube up in the sky, and to have three very prominent passenger planes go down in one year …

–The continued civil war in Syria, which just had its deadliest year, with 76,000 killed. And the return of violence to Iraq, where things had been semi-quiet for a few years.

–The emergence of the self-styled Islamic State in Syria, and its seizure of large tracts of Iraq. The most violent and pitiless of Islamic terror groups, whose idea of useful propaganda is posting to the web the beheadings of helpless prisoners. This crew morphed into something that looked rather like an army at times, and it led to IS control of big chunks of desert on either side of the Syria-Iraq border, and some significant cities. Mosul, in particular.

–The resumption of a U.S.-led air war, against IS. This one drew in the UAE and Jordan; the UAE airforce has been directly involved in many airstrikes against the Islamic State.

Violence in the Gaza Strip, Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria, an air crash in Mali, race riots in the U.S., economic jitters as the price of oil collapsed …

It just seemed like a bad year. Worse than the global recession years of 2008 and 2009, or so it seemed.

We must concede, however, that we are more likely to know about most everything bad around the world, in the modern era. You can avoid television and newspapers, but then the news bleeds over to social media, and there it is.