2024 is an election year. Tensions are high, politicians are leading everyone to believe that things are worse now than they've ever been.
News is more biased than ever - trying to sway you to one extreme or another. It's getting harder to figure out what's fact and where the United States stands economically.
In the last 20 years, the U.S. has been involved in wars with foreign countries. Invasions have taken place between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Hamas.
The world dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. fell into the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2009.
Despite all of this, globally the world has gotten better. There are new treatments for cancer and other diseases. Third-world countries are gaining access to new technologies and better water. New discoveries about our oceans, animals and energy are saving our planet.
The world is getting better, we just have to change our perspective to focus on the good.
Goodness Exchange wrote an article called The World IS Getting Better: Here Are The Facts1proving that the world we are living in today is getting better overall, contrary to what you may see or hear.
- Life expectancy is increasing, and it's been up 6 years since 1990.
- As of summer of 2021, only 16% of Americans reported smoking cigarettes in the prior week. In the 50s and 60s, it was at 45%.
- The world is more educated than ever before. The number of years spent in school per student is increasing in most countries.
The WIRED also released an article called 20 Things That Made the World a Better Place in 20232, highlighting achievements that may have gone unheard.
- Scientists discovered that combined drugs and radiotherapy decreased women's risk of death or relapse of cervical cancer by 35%.
- The United Nations signed a treaty agreeing to protect marine life in international waters, two-thirds of which fall outside our nation's borders.
According to Time.com article3, air pollution-related deaths have continued to decrease for 27 years, 40,000 less than the 90s. The percentage of people who have clean drinking water has risen almost 8% since the early 2000's, at 85% to 92.3% in 2017.
Politicians and news outlets want you to look at the glass half empty, it's how they profit.
Stop watching the news, it is crucial to living a carefree life. It distorts our view of what's going on outside of our own lives.
We are constantly improving, innovating, and discovering new ways to be better humans in a better world. There may be not so great things going on temporarily, but looking at the bigger picture, our world is improving.
1https://goodness-exchange.com/remarkable-stats-about-our-world-getting-better/
2https://www.wired.com/story/2023-positive-news/
3https://time.com/5754155/global-advances-2019/
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Alex Bishop, CRPC®, MS, is a Private Wealth Advisor and Franchise Owner with Bishop Financial Partners, a private wealth advisory practice of Ameriprise Financial Services, LLC in Huntersville, NC. He specializes in fee-based financial planning and asset management strategies and has been in practice for 24 years. To contact him, https://www.ameripriseadvisors.com/alex.h.bishop or alex.h.hishop@ampf.com.
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