Based on this article from the BBC It feels like it’s been a bad couple of years, but scientific and societal strides forward in recent decades have transformed global living standards.

And this video with Steven Pinker on The Cobert Report. Steven Pinker believes the world is increasingly nonviolent and that this may be the most peaceful time in human existence.

Or how about in this New York Times article

 President Obama noted: “The world is less violent than it has ever been.” It might seem difficult to reconcile this sentiment with daily horrors in the Middle East, terrorist attacks and other media-hyped doom and gloom. But he’s right: Though violent conflicts still happen around the world, the broad trend lines are all in the right direction.

Take a look at this infographic by phys.org noting everything we are currently fretting about.

So what gives? It feels more chaotic than ever, more violent and most disjointed. Could it be that the real problem is that we aren’t worse off locally or globally but we just aren’t thinking for ourselves? what if we close the newspapers and magazines, turn off the TV, our social media accounts, and the radio? Not as a reactive measure but as a way to measure our own lives. If we were to remove all the data points that are input into our lives and only worked with our experiences how would we answer the following questions?

Have you or someone you love been a victim of violence?

Do you know (personally) a child that has been abducted?

Have you been cyberbullied? Were you ever bullied as a child?

Have you been a victim of a crime or a theft?

Could it be that with a 24-hour news cycle seven days a week we just look for more things to talk about and those things tend to sway towards the negative? What if we made a conscious choice to tune it all out and just look at our lives and our own experiences.  What if we used our own lense to determine our level of safety and security, based not on what we are told but based on what we see, hear and experience ourselves. It’s time to stop listening, stop being scared and take our lives back and leave the fear behind. Do your own homework, research this topic – things just are not as bad as we want them to seem. Ask yourself why are citizens living so fearfully in this day and age? Could it be by design? Fearful societies watch over each other, they behave and they report. Is this the future we all want?