The incredible privilege of CHOICE!
Whenever I speak at conferences and corporate events, I always like to start by reminding people how far we have come as the human race. It’s not always obvious to most of us because we are generally focused on life as it is this moment.
We rarely take the time to truly understand human history and what it was like to live in before times because we are “busy". But today, I want to share a perspective that hopefully helps remind you just how lucky we are to live in the time that we do.
Human beings have been doing their thing on earth for about the last 50,000 years or so. Even if we just go back 200 years ago, the majority of people who lived back then worked to eat. In other words, if you were awake and there was sun light then you were generally working just to make sure that you could afford to eat just so that you could go back to work again tomorrow.
Back then, human beings didn’t have electricity and all the accompanying tech that electricity enabled. Most of the world didn’t have access to clean water or a functioning medical system that allowed us to go to the doctor if we were sick. There certainly was no internet. If we go back even 200 years, only a lucky few hit the ancestral jackpot and were born into wealthy families and privileged positions. Everyone else, however, was born into torrid conditions and from there, there was very little they could do to shape their destinies. If they didn’t work themselves to death, they would simply starve to death.
Today, we moan about many aspects of life but we don’t realise how good we have it. More than anything, technology has brought about abundance to the lives of the average person. It has enabled widespread democracy in terms of our ability to impact the world. And as a result, we now live in a world where the majority of human beings get to choose how our lives function and look like. And THAT is a pretty BIG DEAL!
I can only look at my life with incredible gratitude. I wasn’t born into money by any means but my parents had enough money to put food on the table and we had some money left over at the of the month. My brothers and I didn’t have too worry about having a roof over our heads and we were able to enjoy the benefits that modern technology provided. Let me explain. I happened to be born at a time when human beings collected all of humanity’s knowledge and placed it on an easily accessible network called the internet. It cost my family a very small portion of our monthly income to access the internet which allowed me to learn anything about anything at virtually no cost. Each year as the internet matured and got more powerful, it allowed me to connect with other people just like me all around the world. In the last 15 years, all these converging technologies like powerful software tools, the internet and my cell phone ultimately allowed me to become an creator at virtually no cost and as a result, I became an entrepreneur that was able to shape the way my life works. In other words, I got to choose. And if you are reading this right now because you have access to the internet and thus access to Facebook, then you get to choose too.
This is why we have so much to be grateful for in 2019 and beyond. Sure, there is still poverty in certain parts of the world but that number is drastically smaller than ever before and dwindling each year. And even then, thanks to technology, poor people have a decent shot of changing the way their lives work compared to times gone by.
This is why I’d like to remind you how lucky we all are today! For the first time in humanity’s history, we are becoming a species that can choose how every facet of their lives work. The internet is an excellent example of how technology brings abundance because it has democratised access to information for almost everyone on earth. Every year that passes, it gets easier to live life on earth because it gets easier to share information with each other and thus build on top of each other’s thoughts, ideas, and technologies and virtually no cost.
The only real challenge the majority of us face as technology evolves is the paradox of choice and our ability to constantly compare our lives with those around us. It seems we aren’t always so good at making decisions when we have a million options and we tend to become grossly unhappy when we constantly compare our lives to everyone else instead of appreciating how good our own lives are. Either way, I’ll take my chances in this new world and so should you. Because today I got to choose what I would do with my time and I decided to use that time to tell you just how lucky we all are. That is the incredible privilege of choice that so many before us never had.
Choose wisely!