Being Mindful...about our good fortune

What a time…

The final weeks of 2022 marked the birth month of the 8 billionth citizen of planet Earth. Vinice Mabansag, a baby girl born in Tondo, Manila on November 15, was chosen to symbolically mark this milestone.

Vinice was born in a truly remarkable time:

On average, she arrived twice as wealthy as a baby born only 16 years before her (measured by GDP per person, in global real purchasing power parity terms). She opened her eyes in a world in which around 91% of its inhabitants have escaped extreme poverty. When her mother was a toddler, 38% of people on Earth were still trapped in deep destitution, not to mention only 120 years ago, when an estimated 75% of people on the planet were desperately poor.

Indications are that desperate poverty will be totally eliminated during Vinice's teenage years. Famine and its consequences are something she will probably be mainly exposed to in a history class lesson. For her forebears, severe food poverty was a universal, regular, and devastating phenomenon.

In the past two decades, only 0.5 people per 100,000 died due to famine per decade, compared to between 30 and 80 people in the first half of the twentieth century. Today, global undernourishment is estimated to be around 9% (compared to 50% as recently as 1945).

Vinice entered a world in which the average under-five mortality rate fell to below four percent, down 61% since 1990. In 1800, nearly fifty percent of children died before their fifth birthday. Life expectancy in her part of the world is 74 years today, compared to 41 in 1950. The time-saving technologies of her time likely mean she will live at least '10 times longer' than her grandmother.

She will grow up in a world in which life-saving vaccines are developed in months instead of the traditional 10 to 15 years; in which '-isms' are called out, and prejudice and attitudes of inequality are vigorously opposed. In the year 1900, women had the right to vote only in New Zealand; women now have the right to vote in every country and territory in the world, except for one.

The newborn would not have been happy if she could have been told that she inherits a region in which air pollution is causing nearly 20% of deaths; but she will spare a thought for the fact that it has come down by 6 percentage points since 1990. And she may take comfort in the fact that, in 2022, global capital spent on wind and solar assets surpassed investment in oil and gas wells for the first time ever. Also, her birth coincided with the 27th UN Climate Change Conference, where world leaders were held responsible for solutions to reverse the damage her forefathers had done to the planet she became heir to.

Fortunately, Vinice entered a much more peaceful world: Over the last 1,000 years, an average of two new conflicts between European countries broke out every single year. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Great Powers were at war more than 75% of any given year. The rest of the world was not much more peaceful. Miraculously, conflict has become an exception rather than a rule.

There are so many more relative blessings in which our 8 billionth citizen had been born, aside from all the over-communicated daily challenges of our time: A global literacy rate of nearly 90% (42% in 1942); the ability to do online banking on a transatlantic flight at 30,000 feet in the air; the fact that nearly 70% of the world's total population now uses a mobile phone; the list goes on and on…

Suffice to say that President Barack Obama's words from a few years ago offer a valid reprise in a lullaby to Vinice: "If you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now." Let's hold thumbs that she will never allow herself, like so many around her, to be overcome by the bleak view of the world that dominates headlines.

As you reflect upon your own life and contemplate the project of living in a significant way, may you spare a moment to pause in gratitude; realising that you are also sharing in so many of the under-published comparative privileges of our time. Most of the challenges for those of us who read this message are distresses related to choice – and of stepping out of our own sunshine.

May you be different, and resolve to turn the privileges of our time into personal magic and momentum – as an individual, family member, citizen, and business owner.