RS: Not Everything Sucks

This blog post is my response to “Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats” released by BBC and “Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future” released by TED in February 2012

Turn on the news and 98% of what you see will be negative; tornados, tsunami's, earthquakes, war, murder, you name it, it will be mentioned. Why has our society become so negative and cynical? Yes, things are not doing too great right now, but compare it to what it could be? Compare today to this day 50 years ago and appreciate how far not only the United States, but every other country, has progressed.  

According to Hans Rosling’s video, “200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes”, two hundred years ago we were all in the same range of poor and low life expectancy. Slowly but surely, all countries came up and now we all are within the middle to high range. Instead of focusing on the negatives, why can’t we think of how far we’ve come?

 As stated by Peter Diamandis, “Over the last hundred years, the average human lifespan has more than doubled; average per capita income adjusted for inflation around the world has tripled. Childhood mortality has come down a factor of 10. Add to that the cost of food, electricity, transportation, communication have dropped 10 to 1,000-fold. Steve Pinker has showed us that, in fact, we're living during the most peaceful time ever in human history. And Charles Kenny that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent in the last 130 years. We truly are living in an extraordinary time. And many people forget this”

He’s totally right. We have made so many progressions, and if you look at statistics, we've got a lot more growing that is happening right as we speak.


 So why is it that we are just so focused on what’s NOT going right? Is it just wide spread worldwide cynicism? How did we become so ungrateful for what we have? Lets not forget that we are raising children in these “horrible times”. Why don’t we teach the future leaders of our countries to be thankful, and to see a bigger picture than our narrow, privileged minds can.

Peter Diamandis: Abundace is our future