Today ( 12.10) is my birthday, this is the day I turn 38. And today I would like to introduce two books: Enlightenment now, and Factfullness.
Here are the two books that tell you the positive trends that your newspapers won’t tell you– that our lifespan is increasing, that living standard is raising for everyone, even more so for those who live in third world country, that crimes and violence are going down, that child mortality is decreasing to an all time low and will continue to do so, that population bomb will not happen despite the reduction in child mortality ( because people tend to have less children when their living standard increases), that we are living in an unprecedented prosperity now.
Ray Kurzweil, a prominent futurist even predicted that those who live by year 2045 can achieve immortality, thanks to the constant progresses we make against sickness and disease.
Human, with their ever ingenuity and creativity, leverage on science and technology constantly to make the world a much better place.
Going forward, armed with my insight and experience, coupled with the universal accessibility of education and better equality of opportunity, I can help to steer my daughters into brighter paths than what I could hope to achieve.
There is never a better time for me and my daughters to be in, than now.
But why then we are not feeling this at all?
One of the very important reasons is because we are being bombarded daily by negative news in the newspapers and social medias. Not surprising, as newspapers and social medias rely on bad news to drive sales and capture eyeballs. If our only source of information diet is newspapers and social medias, we will risk missing out on the bigger picture and all the good news. In fact, too much unwarranted negative news can make us depressed, deprive us of the joy and celebration that we deserve.
Which is why reading serious books– as opposed to, say , reading facebook articles or newspapers– is paramount to calibrating our worldview. If you want to know what happens yesterday, you can read newspapers, and sure they will tell you the one thousand and one things that are going wrong with our society, and you have one thousand and one reasons to get worried. But if you want to know what happened in the last fifty years or so, you ought to read long-form books ( especially Enlightenment Now and Factfullness), you will be beaming with hope and optimism, and you will come away with the conviction that tomorrow can be better.
Yes, tomorrow can be better. So one of my birthday wishes is to not let all the petty worries cripple my joy. Things are improving, for us and our children. And we have statistics and hard science to back us up.
It’s also my desire to see more people being enlightened as a result of reading serious books, rather than being herded by social medias. For this reason I’m also immensing grateful because I’m a part of the kindlemalaysia.com/booxmalaysia.com team, because we are helping our fellow young readers to tap into the vast reserve of knowledge and having the correct world view.
Oh, speaking of kindle and boox, we are glad to announce that we are at Big Bad Wolf Melaka, at MITC Ayer Keroh, from 10.10 to 20.10.
Come visit us to see how you can get the cheapest kindle in town, and how you can read books from Kobo, Google Play, Khan Academy on Boox!
