Surfing Reddit the other day, I came across this image.
It’s a comparison of the gold-medal winning vault from the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia and the winning vault from the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, England. My thought when I saw this was, HOLY COW, we are getting SO good at everything! Granted, I know that there are all sorts of things wrong with the training methods used to get gymnasts so good at gymnastics, but still, the fact that we can get it done is astounding. So often I see pessimism about how awful the world is and how everything is getting worse all the time. But that is completely false! Everything is getting better! We are producing more food, keeping more people healthy, preventing more fear and showing more love than we ever have in all of history.
This is not just my opinion either. In the last three months I have read Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Leiberman, and many other books that all confirm the constant, upward direction in which humanity has progressed. As horrible as school shootings are, for example, the very fact a few dozen murders constitute de facto national news means we don’t have anything worse to report.
So be grateful! Be positive! and SMILE!
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