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Last time, I wrote about why a negative view "sounds" more intelligent than being optimistic. I wanted to write today about concrete things where optimism changed the game. But unfortunately, I did not find the time to do it in a way that I am satisfied with.
I received some positive feedback about the topic and the writing from you :) Thank you for that!
And this is the reason why I want to double down on what I started coming up with two weeks ago. Next week, you will get the piece I am still working on about concrete examples where optimism won.
Let's step into the light!
Bad news is relative
As explained in the last piece, there are a lot of things in today's world which could make it easy to say: "the current status sucks, the future sucks, the world sucks, life sucks, everything sucks".
What do we consider for our lives when getting negative news nowadays?
- First and foremost, the war in Ukraine
- the global pandemic with Covid-19
- political uncertainty, especially in Europe due to the rise of populism
- the crashing financial markets
- as a consequence layoffs and uncertainty in labor markets
- the high inflation of everyday commodities
But you cannot hold the view mentioned before when you look into the past, the history of humans, because life is the best it has ever been.
Let's go through history, and check a few things related to today's "problems" we face:
- Death in general
- Health related to sickness
- Poverty
- education
Death
Between the year 0, even when you were living in the richest cities like Rome or Alexandria, through the Renaissance in Italy, the subsequent revolutions in America & France, until around 1900, your chance of surviving adolescence would have been a coin flip's probability (around 46,7 %).
Most people were dying to famine, sickness, war or even labor. But there was a really good chance (around 25 %) that you were not even surviving your own birth. Today, it is a tragedy. In the past, it has been part of life.
I said until 1900, because everything started changing when the 20th century began. By 1950, the global youth mortality rate had nearly been cut in half to 27%. Today, the global infant mortality rate is 2,9%. Somalia, which currently boasts the world's highest youth mortality rate at 14,8%, sits at just 1/3 of the global average from ~100 years earlier. Summarized. the mortality rate which stayed constant throughout millennia, declined in 2-3 generations by 90 %.
As already mentioned, when you were living in central Europe in 1820, you had a 50/50 chance to celebrate your 15th birthday. Let's say you made it, you were living a "normal" life, you would have lived through revolutions, politically unstable extreme Europe. Your grandchildren would be fighting in World War I and their children in World War II. So, the reward of coming out of a chaotic Europe, already in a very delicate state of war between France and the UK, was two generations of war which were perhaps the most horrifying in history.
Then, we have the very famous plagues:
- The Plague of Justinian wiped out 40% of Constantinople (today's Istanbul) in four months
- The Russian Plague killed 33 % of Moscow's population in one season
- The Smallpox
- The Spanish Flue
Yes, Covid-19 has been bad and far too many have fallen victim to it. But can you imagine a city like London with 3-4 Mio. deaths in 4-6 months? Because that happened, and not only once.
Poverty
In 1820, the vast majority of people in the world lived in extreme poverty. This accounts to around 965 Mio. out of a global population of 1,08 Bil. people, which in relative terms means around 90 %!! Today, we have 7-folded the amount of people but decreased extreme poverty to around 720 Mio. people (< 10 %). Of course, we need to improve that because it is absolutely possible. More on that later.
In Germany, we focus nowadays a lot on inequality as the wealth gap is increasing. While this is true that it is growing and we should be careful about it because it leads to social unrest, what gets missed is how much better poor people are nowadays compared to any point in the past. You can be "poor" in Germany but still have a cellphone, giving you access to the world's most precious information, food and shelter provided by social welfare. A luxury which the richest man in (modern) history, JD Rockefeller, didn't have in 1900.
What does the drop in poverty result to? The variable most correlated with poverty is education.
Education
To be exact: literacy. You have to imagine that even centuries after the advent of the printing press, books were still reserved for elites. Written knowledge passed down from generation to generation could only be accessed by a selected few, with the rest of the people relying on word-of-mouth communication. Letters couldn't be written. Notes couldn't be taken.
The progress in the last 200 years is just astonishing:
- In 1800, 12 % were able to read and write.
- In 1900, just 21 % of the world's population was literate.
- In 2016, around 86% of humans on planet earth were educated enough to process and produce information.
The summary of it all
In the end, it is a sheer miracle that humanity was able to progress in such a "magical" way that we are beating nature's limitations. But we did it step by step, through the optimism that times would get better if we would progress by trial & error in different domains. To quote Denzel Washington in one of the best acceptance speeches winning an award:
"Without commitment you will never start, but more importantly: without consistency you will never finish. It is not easy. If it was easy, there were no [...] Denzel Washington. So, keep working, keep striving, never give up. Fall down seven times, get up eight. Ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship. So, keep moving, keep growing, keep learning. See you at work."
The printing press allowed our knowledge to be recorded in a concise way.
Literacy makes concise knowledge available to people to be consumed and to be improved.
The digitization of media has made information scalable to be distributed.
The internet made information available at all times to most of humankind.
Over time, these little miracles, these little breakthroughs, they compounded. Each generation is built from the shoulders of the previous, beginning life with an advantage over the generation before. Everything we take for granted, especially health, access to food and information, was considered a miracle to anyone living 70 years ago.
I wholeheartedly believe that the biggest issue is a lack of perspective: We struggle with purpose, our ancestors struggled with survival.
Asking "What do I want to do with my life?" is a privilege, considering the primary concern for everyone before us was "How do I stay alive?".
So, see you at work.