This is the best time in human history

Let’s prepare the 22nd century !

Some of you have read/heard me rant about tech armchair quarterbacks so I won’t be one on macroeconomics but…. I will say that I’m still quite befuddled/stricken with disbelief when reading analysis on the latest US jobs report and some early calls for a recession in North America. In January, in the shadow of the Paris attacks, I wrote here that I remained an optimistic realist for the years ahead. My friend Francis Gosselin recorded a companion podcast you can listen to here. In the spirit of Easter and resurrection, I wanted to share these few thoughts and start a conversation.

Let me explain: it would be preposterous not to see that we are living a century-shaping decade in terms of the wheels coming off on all fronts, in macroeconomics, democratic institutions etc… As it is often said, crisis in Mandarin means opportunity. It strikes me that 2008 and the Great Recession was a crisis wasted where world governments, running around like headless chickens, resorted to kick the can down the road in lieu of starting the necessary rehauling of our entire human construct. The daily challenges to sanity in the form of terrorist attacks, viruses both human and digital, water crises in California and Brazil, need to be analyzed against a larger historical backdrop.

This is the best time to be living in human history: we are collectively in better health, with longer lifespans, have access to more opportunities, and are about to embark on a new civilizational era, the age of the human/machine symbiosis. The opportunities for self-reinvention and innovations are boundless, the sky really is the limit if you want it to be and it is high time to go into the unknown because it’s what humans have done best since a few thousand of our ancestors wandered from the Rift Valley in Africa and populated our planet.

Our so-called generation X, looked down upon as “slackers” by our boomer parents has a centennial task at hand: working with the Y and Z to reinvent our world, our global relationships with each other, our democratic institutions and prepare the 22nd century, which is in a mere 85 years, which is only a lifetime. Some of our children will be there with their own to usher in a new century, let’s make it peaceful, inspiring and a new human beginning ! Game on !