A reader sent me an article recently which said “This is the Golden Age. For you, your family, everyone you know, and everyone else around the planet, there has never been a better time to be alive. But it doesn't feel that way, does it? Your mind is likely filled with thoughts of recent terrorist attacks, racial tensions and economic crises." I agree 100%. I’ve gotten quite a few emails from readers on observations from an old man and more observations from an old man. There are a lot of positives with this generation and here is a short list. The world has never been more peaceful. Civil wars are down 40% since 1990. They are also becoming less lethal. In the 1950s 86,000 people would die on average, now it's 3,000In the middle ages you had a 1 in 8 chance of dying violently in some kind of war. Now that number is minuscule even when accounting for disease and famine related causes. Threat of nuclear war? Warheads are down (and declining) from a peak of 70k, to 24k today.Poverty has gone down. The number of people living on less than $1.25 a day dropped 52 percent to 21 percent in the past 30 years. The majority of the people in the U.S. today who would be considered themselves 'poor' in fact live better than the average folk centuries ago. They might not be able to afford the luxuries advertised to them, but they have better access to medicine, nutrition and shelter. Hunger is down 40%. There are 78 MILLION fewer child laborers than there were just 14 years ago. The number of democracies have increased exponentially from a low of 11 in 1900, to over 80 today. Crime rate is significantly down in the USA and Canada. Significantly. Life spans are always increasing. Malaria rates? Down. Teen pregnancy? Down. Smoking? Down. We rarely hear about these good news in the media because bad news brings attention and sells while good news is just not very captivating. Imagine if you turned on the t.v. today and it said “The world is fine. You have nothing to worry about.” You would think “Ok then”, and carry on with the rest of your day. Negative news demand our instant attention and stories and images influence us far more than numbers. Everything is fine. In fact, we have to worry more about our own choices. Never has there been a time in history where the average person is given more choices from what we eat to how we spend our free time. We have more access to good food and bad food at the same time. We can use the internet for self-education or waste time watching funny cat videos. Remember why the computer was invented in the first place? It was made to do work and to save us time. Now we use it primarily for entertainment. Not only do we work more, we feel more stressed out and end up having less time for ourselves.