If You Want To Live in the Past You Either Failed History or Didn’t Take At All.
This is an article about Why We’re Living in the Best Time in the History of the World.
Every time I wake up, I feel an inexplicable force. Not one you might be thinking, like strength, but rather a force that makes the world move, that moves the shapers of society.
As Shawn Achor said in his book The Happiness Advantage, “Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change, it is the realization that we can.”
The force I feel could be described as happiness. It’s what makes me believe that the world is in an unbelievable place that is so hard to ignore. After thousands of years, we seem to not have learned anything from history. The past does not change the present, but if we learn to recognize the patterns of the past, we assure a better future. Quite frankly, most of us perceive the word past with a negative connotation.
By definition, the past is the time gone by or, as I like to call it, “boring things that happened a long time ago that unfortunately we need to know if we want a better future.” No, just kidding. The past is not that boring (well, maybe
just a little bit).
We will soon reach 10 billion people on Earth. Some of the billions still live rough lives that include misery and injustice, that have only gotten worse in recent months and years. But most people are much better off than our ancestors in many respects, such as nutrition, shelter, entertainment, health, and life expectancy. I don’t think this fact needs to be said, but some people still argue that life in the past was better. But this great past where life was simple, rich, happy, and spiritual was generally available only to the wealthy.
Imagine if you were a woman, a person of color, or a member of the LGBTQ community. You would not want to live in the past. If you meet a least one of these characteristics and still want to live in the past, you either failed history or never learned it at all.
Let me ask you this. Go back 300 years. Already there? Okay, now try to make a reasonable prediction of progress in the year 2100. It’s practically impossible to make that prediction, isn’t it? Future progress, especially human progress, is incredibly hard to foresee. Yet the pessimists of today seem to be making certain predictions for the end of humanity. Like I said, there is no logical way to make this possible. Now, if you think about and hear the current pessimists, it’s difficult not to think that they are wrong. Of course, measuring the past should not mean that we’re done; it should mean that there is still a lot more work to be done.
A powerful study conducted by Max Roser, an economist at
the University of Oxford, demonstrated that on virtually all of the key dimensions of human material well-being — poverty, literacy, health, freedom, and education — the world is an extraordinarily better place than it was just a couple of centuries ago.
A survey made by the organization Our World in Data asked, “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?” and found astonishing results.
In Sweden, only 10 percent thought things were getting better, and here in the United States it was only 6 percent, or about 20 million people. Very few people think the world is getting better, a super ironic fact in a world where knowledge and education are improving exponentially, that especially in developed countries there is a widespread of ignorance about the current state of the world.
I would have never even considered that thought of the world getting worse. What? To give a wider perspective, “more than 9 out of 10 people do not think that the world is getting better.” Perhaps there’s a reason why I may not even have considered such an outrageous thought.
From the book Generation Optimism by Juan David Campolargo Copyright © 2019 by Juan David Campolargo. Published by New Degree Press.
In this article series, I share excerpts and stories from my book, Generation Optimism. I hope you enjoyed this post — if you enjoyed it and want to connect with me on social media: Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
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