It’s easy to get sucked into the media-spun bad news vortex, a depressing and everlasting barrage of hardship, heartache and misery.
Our narrative is so often focused on singular voices. The individual stories of our fellow humans that are profound and heart wrenchingly real.
Personal testimony resonates deeply within us. But empirical data captured over time? Not so much. These cold graphs and faceless pie charts become uninteresting to our warm blooded brain.
This is despite many of them capturing a resoundingly positive ‘bigger picture’ of rapidly declining early child death, sky rocketing literacy levels and extreme poverty at an all time low.
Yes. Human beings will always turn to the story of another, before they do a spreadsheet.
And so they should, we are all human after all. But we must also remember to see the wood from trees.
Because, as much as it may not seem like it, the world is getting better, fairer and less miserable *slowly* over time.
And this constant catastrophizing, not to mention the hand wringing and virtuous elephant tears that come with it, only infantilises the spectacular progress of the world’s developing nations.
So what about the hundred million that India has pulled out of poverty?
Or the incredible emergence of democracies worldwide?
Or the booming economies of Africa which continue to dominate the IMF tables?
Right now, we live in the most peaceful time in human history – who knew?
Of course, I’m not going to pretend that the world doesn’t have its problems.
It does.
And I’m not going to suggest we stop looking for more solutions.
We must.
I just think we should gain a little perspective. Let’s take a step back and see how far we’ve come.
Perhaps even… dare I say it, give ourselves a little credit?
Well done world, let’s keep going. 👏 🌍
Source:
https://tinyurl.com/24nkn9ar
https://tinyurl.com/a66zhc
Images by – christopher-burns, cristian-castillo, sutirta-budiman, capturing-the-human-heart, nathaniel-tetteh, caique-silva from Unsplash.