Part 1 of the Optimist’s Guide to the 21st Century

The next time you sit down to dinner, start off the conversation with the statement: “The world today is more peaceful, more prosperous, and healthier than at any point in human civilization.” Wait a few seconds for it to sink in, and then ride out the inevitable storm of protestations, most of which will begin with: “Well today on the news I heard…” or “I saw a picture in the paper the other day…” While the commotion roils, take solace in the knowledge that your statement is entirely correct. Once the uproar has subsided, pull out this article, and slowly begin to turn everyone’s world upside down. Indeed, any way you look at it, humans today are better off than at any other point in history.

This is the first in an indeterminate number (I’ll put the bounds at one and infinity) of articles about the drastic improvement in the human condition throughout history. It is designed to get past the surface-level stories of constant strife we hear reported in the press and take a fact-based look at the current and historical state of human affairs. When two years ago, I began reading deeper into the large scale trends surrounding humanity, I expected to find a roller-coaster graph of human living conditions over time with large drops and rises, and the modern world in a particularly deep trough. What I discovered instead is that the story has been a gradual increase with a dramatic acceleration in the latter half of the 20th century (what is called exponential growth).

Human Condition Over Time

image source: Levi Brown

When the Health of the Environment and the Health of Your Wallet Align

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling nonfiction work Outliers, it takes 10,000 hours to achieve world-class expertise in a field such as playing an instrument or becoming a professional athlete. Based on this logic, one LED lightbulb could accompany you through the process of becoming a concert-level piano player, learning to speak French like a native, and then halfway to making it as a professional tennis player. As incredible as it may seem, the average LED lightbulb is rated to last for a minimum of 25,000 hours, or in practical terms, 22.8 years at 3 hours of usage per day. If you want the same duration of light from incandescent bulbs with an average lifetime of 1,000 hours, you will have to interrupt your studying to swap bulbs 25 times.