What If Things Are Better Than We Think?

“Perhaps we’ve become so accustomed to seeing what’s broken that we’ve forgotten to notice what’s growing.”

Hi,

I hope you’ve had a good weekend.

I’ve often thought that the pessimist is nearly always right, while the optimist is nearly always successful. It’s a curious thought, but it points to a bigger truth: being right and moving forward are not always the same thing. The pessimist says, “It won’t work,” so they don’t bother trying. And when nothing happens, they can sit back with the quiet satisfaction of having been right all along. The optimist, on the other hand, wonders, “What if it does?” So they give it a go.

Sometimes they fail, sometimes they learn, and occasionally something wonderful happens that they could never have imagined.

The trouble is that being right and moving forward are not always the same thing.

I sometimes think we see something similar in how we view the world. Switch on the morning news while the kettle boils, and you’d be forgiven for thinking everything is falling apart.

Yet when we step back and look at the bigger picture, a remarkable truth emerges: the world has made extraordinary progress, even if it rarely makes the evening news. In 1900, global life expectancy was just 32 years. By 2023, it had risen to 73. In 1990, one in eleven children died before their fifth birthday.

By 2024, that figure had fallen to around one in twenty-seven. And in just nine years, between 2015 and 2024, nearly a billion more people gained access to safely managed drinking water.

Of course, statistics don’t always reflect how life feels on a Monday morning.

When you’re worried about your family, struggling financially or wondering how much longer you can keep going, the bigger picture can seem a long way off. And there’s still enormous suffering in our world. But two things can be true at once. Things can be genuinely difficult while life is also getting better in ways we may not notice.

Perhaps we’ve become so accustomed to seeing what’s broken that we’ve forgotten to notice what’s growing.

And perhaps that’s why we need more dealers of hope in a world that seems to be yearning for it. Not people who pretend everything is wonderful or dismiss the difficulties others face, but people who help us see possibilities we may have stopped noticing.

A word of encouragement, a different question or simply someone believing in us can make an enormous difference.

We have no shortage of people pointing out what’s wrong with the world.

Perhaps we need a few more helping us imagine what could still go right.

The pessimist may well be right about everything that could go wrong, but they don’t know everything that could go right.

So here’s my question for you this week:

Who in your life might be struggling to see what’s possible, and how could you help them find a little hope this week?

Have a wonderful week.
Mark

Sources: Our World in Data — Life Expectancy; UNICEF — Child Mortality; WHO/UNICEF — Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (2025).