Just a few days until the end of the year and I have been reflecting on the state of the world these days. Judging by the news outlets and our social media feeds, the world as we know it is coming to an end. We are doomed. This is the worst time in history to be alive. But, if you think about it carefully, it is impossible for this to be the worst time ever. Just picture our parents and grandparents who lived through two world wars, two post-war depressions, a few civil wars, hundreds of dictatorships and many economic recessions, and still, they managed to raise your parents and raise you so that you could make it to where you are today. Is this really the worst time ever or is it that we have no idea what tough times are really like?
Don’t get me wrong, admittedly there are some really bad things happening in the world today and we must address them and try to fix them. However, before writing this post, I started thinking about how to make this a better world. So, I wrote a list of the things that I thought could be changed in order to achieve that and, when my list got to almost a hundred lines, I learned two lessons:
Most of the things that I consider to be in urgent need of fixing will never compare to having your city taken over by Nazis and your family sent to concentration camps.
If I started filtering people who committed any of the “crimes” in my list out of my life, I’d probably end up alone in the world.
I’m not trying to say that nowadays there are no people going through hell and possibly living the worst situations imaginable, but the majority of us complaining about the state of the world today live very privilege and comfortable lives and don’t really know suffering. Things are not that bad in comparison to where we come from, they just seem worse because of the way the media and our feeds are exposing us to them.
I read somewhere that mayflies only live for a few hours. For them, 3 hours is a lifetime. Our species gets to live to a hundred years these days, that’s 300000 mayflies’ lifetimes. For the last 100 million years, mayflies have only existed to be born, reproduce and die. However, human beings went from living an average of 31 years in 1900 to the life expectancy that we have today. Clearly, we live better lives these days than at any point in history.
We mustn’t stop fighting to right the wrongs in the world today, but we must also count our blessings and acknowledge how far we have come as a species. Let’s condemn the wrongdoings, but let’s also praise the accomplishments that we have achieved. There are good people doing really good things out there, but only the bad ones are getting all the press. Besides, if we want to keep on fighting to make things better, we must at least know that there is the possibility for things to get better. In the words attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
Have a wonderful 2019.
Photo credits: image by Andrzej Gruszka.
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