Our society tends to focus on the negatives. The media is looking for clicks. Politicians want to sow fear and division to rally their troops.
And the rest of us worry, so we focus more on threats than on good news and opportunities.
Meanwhile, the past 200 years have been an incredible success story for mankind. We who live today have it far better than the generations that came before us. Life expectancy is up, child mortality is down, we have gone from a world where all but a handful lived in poverty to one where the global majority leads pretty decent lives. This is basically also the reason of the current obesity problem. Throughout history, starvation was not just a threat, it was a commonly occurring reality. Our bodies and brains are hardwired to favour energy dense food and store fat. It is only in the last century that we have found ourselves living in abundance, and we are not programmed for that.
A hundred years ago less than 1% lived in a country that granted suffrage to all it citizens, regardless of race or gender. Today roughly half the world population live in some sort of democracy.
But we hardly ever think about all this. We just look at the latest scary headlines and worry that things may be headed the wrong way.
I’m a numbers nerd, so I apologize that this is not a nice anecdote, but a handful of charts.
That’s who I am, that’s what I do. But I hope it still helps lift the mood.
https://www.voronoiapp.com/demographics ... turies-785
