people are inherently decent

Just finished reading the book 'Humankind- A hopeful history'. The author argues that essentially human beings are wired to be decent and co-operative, however have been led to believe that we are selfish, vile beings.

In a sense it's true. If we look at people around us, our neighbours, friends, colleagues, helpers. With some minor exceptions we find them mostly good, trustworthy people. Irrespective of social, religious or economic differences. 

However, we all say that the world is bad and turning worse. Which world is this? It's not us, our neighbours or our friends. We are good people. 

Its Others. 

The Others we read about in the newspaper and Internet  or see on TV. Who are essentially bigoted, selfish and evil. 

Why don't we find such people all around us? Are we living in an oasis of goodness surrounded by evil ? No. Its because such bigoted, selfish and evil human beings are the exception. The media reports the exception. It's the nature of news. 

You cant report that a man was crossing the road and drivers waited patiently. If out of the millions of people crossing the road one gets hit by a car, that's news. Millions of people draw cash from the ATM every day. If someone unfortunately gets looted that's news. 

And that's what we consume and it shapes our world view. Our trust in people and how we perceive them. It shapes rules and institutions starting with the assumption that people are untrustworthy. Hence one needs layers of leadership and CEOs to govern them.

How do we fix this ? Atleast for ourselves? 

For one stop seeing online news. Choose the print newspaper which gives nuanced editorials. Else you are anyways not missing anything. 

Travel and meet people from different countries and cultures. The more people you meet the more you realize that people every where are the same. Hardworking, simple and trying to improve their lives. 

Read well researched books and journals.

Be kind and dont be shy to proclaim if you have done some good. Dont tone it down.

For an act of kindness is just as infectious as someone yawning 🙂

company of happiness

Over the past few weeks my search for positive news across media continued. Still did not find a news article which might make readers/viewers feel happy.

Unless the reader was Mr. M Ambani, for who the flurry of cheques continued. Even he would be bored now.

However I did discover something which made me happy.  Company. 

Not the Company which  is 'a commercial business',

but

company which is  'the fact or condition of being with another or others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment.'

After nearly six months I met friends and relatives over the past two weekends. It was comforting to watch people (in flesh and blood) talk and laugh together. It felt nice. It felt happy.

So much so that I forgot checking my phone for 4 hours. There was no urge to check messages or aimlessly scroll news articles.

And obviously if human interaction is pleasant why would one go to the internet. The news is depressing and applications have turned from productivity tools in to attention seeking and manipulation agents. But we already know that.

So a couple of suggestions for happier weekends.

Meet friends face to face. Share. Laugh.

And switch off ALL app notifications on your phone. 

Try it!

Things are getting better

Over the past week I had been tracking news across media in the hope of finding inspiration for that first heart warming story. I did not find anything. It seems things are particularly bad all across the world.

Except, that they are not. 

In order to showcase that things have never been better for humanity, I have picked statistics from a TED talk by Steven Pinker 2 years back. Of course, the timescale is long term. 

People largely agree on what goes into human well-being: 

Life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, happiness. All of these things can be measured. If they have improved over time, that is progress

• Life : For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30. Today, worldwide, it is more than 70, and in the developed parts of the world, more than 80. 
• Poverty: 200 years ago, 90 percent of the world's population subsisted in extreme poverty. Today, fewer than 10 percent of people do. 
• War: For most of human history, the powerful states and empires were pretty much always at war with each other, and peace was a mere interlude between wars. Today, they are never at war with each other. More recently, wars of all kinds have become fewer and less deadly. The annual rate of war has fallen from about 22 per hundred thousand per year in the early 1950s to 1.2 today. 
• Democracy has suffered obvious setbacks in Venezuela, in Russia, in Turkey and is threatened by the rise of authoritarian populism in Eastern Europe and the United States. Yet the world has never been more democratic than it has been in the past decade, with two-thirds of the world's people living in democracies. 
•  Safety: 
• Over the last century, we've become 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car crash, 
• 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 
• 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 
• 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job, 
• 89 percent less likely to be killed by an act of God, such as a drought, flood, wildfire, storm, volcano, landslide, earthquake or meteor strike,  
• 97 percent less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning. 
• Education: Before the 17th century, no more than 15 percent of Europeans could read or write. Europe and the United States achieved universal literacy by the middle of the 20th century, and the rest of the world is catching up. Today, more than 90 percent of the world's population under the age of 25 can read and write.  
• Work hours: Westerners worked more than 60 hours per week. Today, they work fewer than 40. (Trying to find similar stats for developing countries, however the trajectory  would be similar)
• Housework: Thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity in the developed world and the widespread adoption of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves and microwaves, the amount of our lives that we forfeit to housework has fallen from 60 hours a week to fewer than 15 hours a weeks

Do all of these gains in health, wealth, safety, knowledge and leisure make us any happier? The answer is yes. In 86 percent of the world's countries, happiness has increased in recent decades. 

So, for all we see or hear in media, this is the best time to be alive as a human being!

Positive News

Ever wondered why which ever media you look at, you only see negative and depressing new? Is the world really such a bad place and is there no good happening? 

The world still has enough good happening and there are enough kind and just people. Just that for some reason negative news draws people more than positive news. It's not the fault of journalism. Just that positive news does not translate to positive business as seen in the chart below. 

However, thats not the point of this post. 

What it seeks to initiate is a social experiment. If one were to build a repository of positive and heart warming  human stories, would that attract people? Would people read them? Would people share them?  

There already might be many more such sites, but does not matter. The world will not lose from sharing more good news.

The veracity of the news will be a challenge and hence news once added may be deleted if found to be fake.

Let's see how it goes.