2020 was the best year in human history.
Let me start by putting something out there: 2020 was the best year in recorded human history.
I wholeheartedly agree with that statement and I came with sources.
At the end of every year for the past few years, a NYtimes columnist and two time Pulitzer prize winner Nicholas Kristof publishes an article entitled “This has been the best year ever”. 2019’s edition is pictured below, and they describe that even despite the fact everything seems bad, through changing your perspective and focussing on what good actually came out of so-called “bad” year you can hopefully realise that it’s not so bad as it seems.
At the time of writing, Mr. Kristof’s article has not been published and I am worried that there won’t be a 2020 version. I am not a writer, but I decided to write my own version this just in case there is anyone who needs the perspective and optimism those articles so uniquely provide.
As we are all reminded to different degrees every single day, 2020 was the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time of writing, there have been 1.76 million deaths from Covid-19 with the numbers continuing to trend upward in many parts of the globe.
So many of us have lost things this year. Most importantly, our loved ones. The ultimate price demanded by Covid-19 is being the cause of death for members of your family. Those 1.76 million people are not merely a statistic — every individual who makes up those 1.76 million are mothers, fathers, grandparents and children. This is the ultimate cost of Covid-19.
We as humans have an innate biological drive to focus on what’s wrong. Over billions of years of evolution by natural selection our intelligence has evolved to give potentially dangerous stimuli much more importance than certain functions. For example, try playing piano and have someone throw a ball at your face — your brain has to decide at that moment, what’s more important? The task of playing piano I have decided to do, or that ball that’s about to hit me in the face? In the modern world, media companies exploit this to sell papers.
Can you remember the last time you saw a headline describing a plane landing successfully, or a car reaching its destination accident-free?
I am not saying for a second that 2020 hasn’t been hard and there isn’t wracking misery at every moment across the world. Everyone is justified in how they feel, but I think Mr. Kristof’s article is a fantastic way to look back on the year and appreciate the fact that no matter how bad things seem to us right now there are always good things happening in the world.
The beginning of 2020 was actually not that long ago. Looking back, it was a different time; most of us were more focussed on Netflix’s new docuseries Tiger King rather than epidemiology.
The year began with Mathematicians proving Batchelor’s Law — which is critically important in the describing the physical nature of turbulence, something science can not explain, yet. This was a taste of what was to come: The Protein Folding problem was solved using artificial intelligence — one of the most important advances in modern science, on par with the discovery of the double helix and has the potential to change medicine as we know it.
Though we were beginning to feel isolated, scientific collaboration continued. We 3d-printed a functioning human heart using stem cells. Dengue fever rates dropped in Yogyakarta, Indonesia by 77% after we released modified mosquitos into the wild.
It wasn’t all research papers of course, NASA announced their plan to send the first woman to the moon, engineer Kristine Davis — blazing trails just like Dr. Kathryn Sullivan, a former astronaut who became the first woman to reach the world’s deepest point in the Mariana Trench.
As human suffering was at the forefront of our minds, the entire continent of Africa was declared endemic polio free, worldwide deaths from Malaria were at their lowest levels on record and Hepatitis-B infections in children under 5 dropped to under 1%. Death by terrorism also dropped globally for the 5th consecutive year.
The world may have seemed to stop for each of us, but good works indeed continued: More people than ever got access to electricity for the first time and we continued to reduce global hunger and starvation — in part by the unrelenting work of the World Food Programme, which included bringing food to 100 million people in need in 2020 alone and was acknowledged by the winning of the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize.
We continued to make progress in areas of gender equality, with a record number of female heads of state and female representation reached 25% globally for the first time — empowering young girls the world over. Women dying as a result of childbirth continued to fall and health outcomes for women improved in other key areas.
It was a year for the environment as well. Bank of America became the final major bank to refuse funding for arctic oil drilling. Fossil fuel divestment accelerated, with companies beginning to see the potential economic ramifications of climate change. The UK’s largest pension fund announced they were no longer investing in coal sands, tar extraction and arctic drilling. The world’s largest insurance provider, Lloyd’s, publicly committed to stopping new insurance cover for coal by 2022, and fossil fuels completely by 2030.
Renewable energy generation surpassed coal for the first time in the US and was met with the biggest US coal energy generation drop in history. It was a year of firsts, with it being the first year that solar energy was cheaper than all other forms of energy , paving the way for a sustainable future.
Efforts made by some to conserve the natural world we live in bore fruit in 2020. Kenya announced their elephant population has more than doubled to around 35,000 since 1989 and elephant death rate by poaching continued to fall. Elsewhere, the number of black Rhinos kept up its steady growth. A species of Eagle declared extinct in England showed up again. There was even a Ugandan Gorilla baby boom. .
I could continue, but hopefully you get my point by now.
It’s human nature to focus on what is wrong with a situation. We by our very nature want to make things better — so anything that is wrong has extra importance. Media companies know this. They know the headlines that sell papers or get clicks are the horrifying ones. With such a propensity to to focus on what is bad and a constant supply of negative news there is no surprise that people are unable to see the whole picture. The part that is getting left out is the fact that each year we are having the best year in recorded history.
It is not idealism to change your perspective and get a complete picture of what is happening. Oftentimes you need to take a step back to see the silver lining of that dark cloud you’re focussing on. This does not mean that there is not abject misery and suffering taking place across the world.
That would be equivalent of something like watching only bad news and thinking the world is only bad.
Though 2020 was an incredibly difficult year, it was indeed the best year in human history.
As Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr once put so aptly:
We could lament that roses have thorns, or rejoice that thorns have roses.
