people, who will become the leaders of the mid 21st century, will be the most educated in human history.4 Approaching the 22nd century, they will experience techno-enhanced lifestyles far beyond our present imagination.5
This is a good time for them to be alive. Most people in the future are likely to live much longer than those who came before them. Since 1900, average life expectancy has more than doubled.6 First-year infant mortality has dropped from 19.5 per cent to 3.69 per cent.7 Global poverty has plummeted from 44 per cent to around 10 per cent in the past 30 years.8
Here is one improvement in this new millennium that will astound most adults. Our present Gen Zs behave better than their parents did at their age.9, 10 You may want to think carefully before you share this information with your resident teenager. Rates of a wide range of discouraged behaviours such as smoking, drinking and even (gasp) sexual activity are much lower than for the previous generation.
Does this mean they are behaving perfectly? Of course not. There are still problems. Today's children are more overweight, and some of their dietary habits need lots of attention. Teenage depression appears to be on the rise. Sporadic violence by a small number is unsettling. A minority become cyber-addicted, and a few engage in cyber-bullying. However, the overall landscape can be viewed with some degree of optimism.
For the sake of our children and their future, let's set the record straight. Most indicators (although not all) clearly show that the standard of living has improved dramatically for many people around the world. Right now there are countless projects taking place that are as inspiring as the Ocean Cleanup, and they have been developed by young people who want to make life better for all of us.
But let's pause for a moment and consider: is everything really all that wonderful?
THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL MESS
It's two and a half minutes to midnight right now, according to the Doomsday Clock, featured in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.11 First introduced in 1947, this symbolic clock face represents the assessment of a group of eminent scientists as to how close the world is hypothetically to nuclear disaster. In 2007, its brief was expanded to include the danger of catastrophic climate change. Its time setting has varied over the years, from a relatively optimistic 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 to the present more pessimistic evaluation.
If you are a pessimist looking for evidence that the world is in trouble, you will find plenty to justify your personal belief. Terrorist threats, global warming, refugee resettlement, youth underemployment, worldwide economic debt, and the increasing divide between rich and poor are probably never far from your mind.. and they're only the long-term concerns.
We are also vulnerable to a litany of one-off events with the potential to reshape world history. Natural disasters, solar flares, recalcitrant robots, cyberwars and perhaps even the occasional meteorite could compromise all life on planet Earth. Will there be more of these types of events? You can bet your life on it.
So we can hardly say that life is perfect right now. Then what about the future? Will our children's world be entirely optimistic? Probably not. Will it be deeply pessimistic? That's equally improbable. The world of the future will most likely be a beautiful mess. It has always been so, and it always will be. So whose predictions are more valid, the optimists' or the pessimists'? Given that optimists invented the aeroplane and pessimists invented the parachute, both perspectives are useful.
There is another, more attractive perspective, though. Realistic optimism means a healthy balance between the two opposites. Think of people who keep an open mind to all possibilities while still applying a healthy degree of scepticism in their thinking. The future needs lots of these realistic optimists more than it does those at either end of the spectrum. Over-trusting optimists and bitter pessimists are less likely to live a satisfying life. Here's why.
The world of the future will most likely be a beautiful mess. It has always been so, and it always will be.
When you trust everyone and everything as an arch-optimist, you can fall prey to those who take advantage of your unquestioning nature. Even when the evidence indicates there is a problem, you will still convince yourself it's not true. You want to believe the world is perfect. If you are too pessimistic, on the other hand, you will miss out on many opportunities, convinced that there is a trap in there somewhere. You probably worry much more than is necessary, to the detriment of your own welfare.
Pessimists did indeed invent the parachute, but they also risk becoming entangled in its cords. Standing in the same prison cell, some people see bars where others see stars. French writer Anaïs Nin once wrote, ‘We don't see the world as it is. We see it as we are'. When someone sees the worst in everything, this may not be a reflection of the world around them. It is just as likely to be a reflection of their inner world.
Imagine if pessimists were to reprogram their amygdalae. These two almond-shaped sets of neurons in our brain react to circumstances that are dangerous, rather than to ones that are safe and positive. In our distant past, this kept us cautious and alive. For most of us, today's risks are less dramatic. The dilemma is that our amygdalae fuel a negativity bias that compels us to pay more attention to what is going badly than to what is going well. And this bias is reinforced by most news bulletins in the mass media.
The better things get, the worse we think they are.
The negativity bias has led to a perverse belief: the better things get, the worse we think they are. Gregg Easterbrook wrote about this dilemma in The Progress Paradox,12 in which he documented two competing influences. One is the unrelenting improvement in many worldwide indicators of life quality; the second is our steadily diminishing level of happiness and perceived wellbeing over the past 50 years. Too many of us are choosing – or have been convinced – to believe that the world is not a good place, and are less happy as a result. So why is that?
Consider what shapes our thinking every day. Over 90 per cent of news coverage is basically bad news. Are all media journalists negative people? On the contrary, most care deeply about their profession, and pride themselves on providing a reasoned viewpoint. As much as anyone else, the general public are to blame. While we claim to recoil from the more horrendous messages, we signal that we prefer them to the good news. The click-through on negative headlines is 63 per cent higher than on positive headlines.13 This encourages news broadcasters to deliver more of what people are clicking, given that higher audience numbers improve their advertising potential.
This gives an unbalanced perspective on global news. The vast majority of events in daily life fall somewhere between uneventful and inspiring. Unfortunately, we are fed a burst of choreographed negative news reports, accompanied by suitably sombre or dramatic music, that represent a minute proportion of that everyday life. Is it any wonder that people believe the world is in big trouble? Constant worry about these events consumes their thinking.
Worrying is wasteful. It creates negative energy, tires us out and rather than resolving an issue, can sometimes make it worse. While we know that worry accomplishes little, stopping doing it is another matter. So here's one question to ask yourself and your children: How many of the things you worry about end up happening? One in ten? Two in ten? If you made the effort to keep a count for the day, you might be surprised by the very low figure. Back in the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne captured this truth when he said, ‘My life has been filled with terrible misfortune, most of which never happened'.
If we went back 30 years, we would find that the global worries then current rarely became the catastrophes we expected. We simply applied our human ingenuity and resourcefulness, and whenever possible we created solutions. When today's children look back three decades from now, will they also find that few of our gravest fears eventuated? It's very likely. If only we had the power to predict the future. Is that possible?
CAN WE PREDICT OUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE?
The short answer is no. Anything that is pure chance cannot be predicted. That includes next Saturday night's Lotto-winning numbers, unfortunately. It also applies to most natural disasters. We cannot predict complex social or political developments more than a year away – or often even those much closer to the present