Tired of Doomscrolling? A Vision for Humanity's Bright Future

Tired of Doomscrolling? A Vision for Humanity’s Bright Future

Being a human in the 21st century can often feel frustrating. We are clearly at the high point of our species – never have so many of us lived so well, been so healthy and well off. At the same time, life is incredibly hard. More than 15,000 children died yesterday, 700 million people live in extreme poverty, and even within rich societies there is loads of unfairness and daily struggle. We are divided, unable to solve our problems while creating new ones, destroying our world in the process. In many ways, the vibe is that we live in dark times.

It’s so easy to feel disconnected and powerless in the face of problems too big to solve. And so the state of the world fills many of us with doom, hopelessness and sadness. But as the author Terry Pratchett said, “we are the storytelling ape, we think in narratives and live in a network of stories that make up our world.” So without minimizing the darkness, we want to add a story that we find helpful for dealing with the world.

More: Humanity’s Greatest Journey: Celebrating 12,025 Years of Human History

The Epic Journey of Humanity

Our story begins with the first moment that ever was – 14 billion years ago, when time and space began from some kind of state of pure energy. From this very first moment, the universe grew and evolved. Things that were one became many. Energy turned into forces and particles, and out of chaos emerged the laws of nature.

From these ingredients, stars arose – gigantic engines, turning simple stuff into complex stuff only to die violently and spread the new complexity around. Out of this more complex stuff, new stars and more worlds emerged, repeating the cycle until most of the simple stuff was used up and most stars that will ever be born had been born.

And then, on one planet, where the conditions were just right, dead particles and molecules combined to make another jump in complexity. Maybe the laws that govern everything were destined to make life happen. Maybe it was just a cosmic dice throw. But life, now the most complex thing in existence, wasted no time and spread to even the tiniest corners.

For billions of years, cells held on, fighting against the elements and each other, evolving in the process. Until one day they came together and made another jump in complexity, to plants, animals and fungi. First in the oceans, then on the land. Earth was now the stage of something grand, a complexity acceleration machine going at full speed. Millions of new species emerged and vanished. Life was beaten down over and over, but every time it came back stronger.

Until a few million years ago, an animal looked at the night sky. It looked at its hands. It saw its reflection in a puddle. And it realized it existed. That it was alive. This is where the human story begins, about six million years ago, with the hominins. Still just another animal among many others, they split into many families and lineages evolving further or disappearing again. But for some reason, their evolutionary niche enabled their brains to grow, and they learned more about this strange world.

They prayed to the stars, they tamed fire and turned stones into tools. They celebrated and cried together. Life was hard and brutally short, but together they endured – probably by telling themselves stories about the world. For almost 250,000 generations, they built a biological foundation. And then, at some point 200,000 years or about 10,000 generations ago, they became us. Humanity had arrived.

The Incredible Progress of Humanity

Our ancestors did not waste any time. Their world was still hard and unforgiving, but out of pure stubbornness they did not accept that. They wanted their lives to be better. So they made better tools and learned to preserve their knowledge beyond death. Progress started slow. And then suddenly they (or better, WE) made the planet our own.

Agriculture and the first villages and temples snowballed into civilization. Kingdoms and empires, technology, writing, astronomy, medicine, philosophy. A hot second later, science, industrialization, the modern world, the information age where we are today. Earth is truly ours now. We changed it in ways unfathomable a few short generations ago. We turned the land into fields worked by millions of machines, built thousands of gigantic jungles made of sand and metal. We split the atom and travelled to other worlds. Everything is different today.

Except us, of course. We humans have not changed. We were molded by a cold and unforgiving world, where we needed to be hard and brutal to survive. We are all still bound to our nature that made us so successful. We still tell stories, are hungry for food, greedy for resources, desperate to be accepted by our peers. We are scared by the dangers that lurk in the dark, imagined and real ones. We are still brutal to each other and the animals we hold power over. We are still territorial and possessive, we fear losing what we have, and we fear change. We downplay the damage we cause and ignore the people in need outside our tribes.

Humans are not nice, and if we look at our history, how could we expect ourselves to be? In nature we see great beauty but also endless violence and struggle, devoid of morals or kindness. We are an instinct driven apex predator that survived in an uncaring world, only now we have coal plants, nuclear weapons and social media. This would be hard to handle for any animal, so it makes sense that we continue to follow the impulses so deeply ingrained in us.

The Potential of Humanity

But this is only because we have not yet caught up with the mind-numbing gift we have been handed. The real tragedy of humanity today is that we are these amazingly powerful beings that have not awoken to their potential. We are trapped in the present and the mindset of a scarce world. But aside from the physical limits of the universe, there is nothing stopping us from creating a literal paradise for ourselves. This seems so daft, but it is true. If we dare to tell ourselves a different story about who we are and who we could be.

Humans throughout history felt like they would witness the apocalypse, and this feels especially true today. But you are probably not living in the end times. There is a solid chance that humanity will persist for thousands, maybe millions of years. If this might be the very start of our history, what can we dream of achieving?

Just like our very first ancestors six million years ago, we may be the ancestors of another 250,000 generations of people. But while the hominins found themselves powerless in a world they had to adapt to, our starting conditions could not be more different. It’s like we got handed a save file of a game where others put in millions of hours of work – and where we can decide what game we want to play in the future.

The world is still horrible. And it is also the best world that has ever existed. And we can make it so much better. An optimistic person living in the year 1924 would not believe the progress we have made in just a century:

We have reduced poverty dramatically
We have cured many diseases
We have much more free time and access to luxuries
We take technological wonders for granted
Far fewer of us die in war
Many more of us live in a democracy

And today, we might very well be gearing up for a jump like our ancestors 10,000 years ago, when agriculture changed everything for everybody. From AI possibly transforming the information age, to biotechnology enabling us to manipulate the language of life itself, to new sustainable ways of harvesting the energy we crave.

If we start thinking in decades and centuries, it is perfectly reasonable that we will solve our problems. We can eliminate poverty, maybe all material needs. Defeat all diseases, maybe even death itself. We have the potential to restore balance to the climate and heal the planet again. We may be able to adapt to the information age and make lasting peace.

None of this is guaranteed and it will be hard and full of failure and setbacks. Some things will get worse before they get better. We will run up against our nature over and over again. But if we manage to clean up our act, we could create a world better than we dare hope for.