10/4/15 - Why I'm Optimistic

There are a ton of horrible things happening in our world every day.  It would be easy to watch the news and come the conclusion that we're all going to be killed by terrorists, shot by a madman, die of some rampant disease, etc.  Every day there's some new calamity, and if I paid attention to nothing but these horrible things, I would shut down, curl up in a ball, and never move again.

However, I have been lucky in that I don't see most of that as I do not have television service in order to watch the news, and what news I catch on social media I can skim through to get the basics without spending too much time on things that aren't actually that important to me.  I know it sounds heartless, but I haven't read an entire article about the shooting that happened in Oregon earlier this week.  It's all over my Facebook and Twitter feeds, but there's literally nothing I can do about it, so I didn't spend much time on it.  This is an attitude that has served me well, and allowed me to spend my time thinking about the future.

The future is bright, as they say, and I, for one, believe that to be true.  Just a few days ago I read about the possibility of using carbon nano tubes to create high efficiency, low power transistors that could once again put us on track to increasing speeds and abilities of computers.  Every increase in computation power increases the well being of people, everywhere, so this is very exciting news.  This is why I'm optimistic about the future: people continue to push forward and, in doing so, raise the standard of living of everyone.

I know I've spent my fair share of time complaining and otherwise being negative, but I don't think that's really a path forward.  We all need to vent from time to time, but in order to move forward, we need to deal in solutions, not complaints about problems.  Technology increasingly makes finding a solution easier and easier.

In 2015, thanks to increases in technology, GDP per person in the U.S. reached an all time high, despite the lackluster recovery and the possibility of a rate hike from the Fed.  In fact, GDP per person worldwide has almost doubled since 1950.  People are living better now than they ever have, and still wealth continues its upward trend.  This is why I'm optimistic.

So, I know this is a short post, but I just wanted to say that the future is bright, and the facts are on the side of the optimists.  Despite all the media coverage, crime is on a downward trend, and standard of living is on an upward trend.  If we continue to push forward and embrace the future with open arms, we may see a world in which gross poverty and undernourishment are abolished.  Already it's down from 18.7% to 11.3% just in the last 20 years.  Despite everything bad happening in the world, there is still plenty of reason to hope for a better tomorrow.