Every day I wake up I feel lucky to be alive. Not only do we live in one the best countries in the world we are all alive in the very best time in history. Just think, we may have been born 500 years ago in the middle ages or the dark ages. A time where nothing changed for your entire life. A life where you only knew toil, pain, poverty and repression. Sickness, wars, famine and owning nothing. From the day you were born to the day you died would have seen virtually no change in anything. And it was a world of no opportunity for the common man.
But now things change so fast we can barely keep up. The things I now know about, and the things I have learned are endless. Through reading books and at the flick of a button whether it be the TV or the Internet, I can discover the answers to nearly anything. Documentaries are awesome. All the answers humans ever sought are all now explained visually. Where we came from. Where we are heading. How we got here. How things work. What the stars are. How planets form. The history of the planet and what the earth's made of. Human history and evolution and much more. It's all there to be discovered.
Yet most people aren't interested in anything more than what Jessica Simpson was wearing last night or who is sleeping with who in Hollywood, or what so and so said about someone else. It amazes me that most people don't even know what a star is, let alone what's going on out there in space. The images from the Hubble Space Telescope are truly humbling. We can now see stars being born, stars living and stars dying. We can now see where we came from and how it all happened.
We can see other galaxies with our own eyes. We can see 12 billion years into the past to nearly the birth of the universe. One image, the Hubble Deep Field shows over 10,000 galaxies in a piece of space we once thought was empty. We can see through an electron microscope things so small that a million of them would fit on the head of a pin. LIFE! Microscopic life, with limbs, armour, blood streams and the finest detail are now evident. Microscopic life that is in battle with other life forms the same size.
The big questions that humans have wondered about for millennia mean nothing to the average person. They aren't interested in knowing the answers. They don't care. What they do care about is so trivial and insignificant in the big picture of life. They know NOTHING! In fact most people don't think full stop. They don't want to think. But if you do want to think, there is an endless amount of wonderful things to think about. What science has now uncovered is truly amazing and wonderful.
Hundreds of years ago there wasn't much to think about. Where to get water. How to hunt. How to build a house and how to farm was about all there was. You wouldn't have known what was further away than the next mountain. Life expectancy was so low. Children would die more often than not. And they would die in pain. There was no pain relief. Not much anyway, certainly not for the poor masses. Life was HARD and unrewarding.
But now, in this exact period of history we can achieve literally anything if we choose to. We can learn anything. We can do anything. We can go anywhere. We have actual matter transporters called jet planes where we enter a room and can go to sleep and wake up in a completely different country and even a different season. I can fly from summer to winter in less than a day and for the cost of a weeks wages. I can be laying on a beach in Australia one day and then be snow skiing in America the next. I have done this!
The last 20 years has been the most prosperous and wealth building times in history. For the average person we have achieved the most unprecedented standard of living ever. As a trader we can now access more information and more trading tools than even the most experienced pro trader could have only a few years ago. It's all on an amazing thing called the Internet. With the Internet a small business person can directly rival the largest companies in the world. The opportunities are there for anyone who wants to try. And all this can be done from the comfort of your own living room.
There's only one hitch to all this and that is the ongoing GFC. Although many people have done very well over the last 20 years, the GFC has really shaken the apple tree. Those exposed to high debt levels will suffer badly. Those relying on their super for their retirement will find it hard to retire when they thought they would. Those who own a business could see all their years of hard work go down the drain. This crises will weed out the real rich from the get rich quicksters. This is not good. But it is just another part of the cycle. The cycle of progress. A learning curve in life.
But you cannot disagree, no matter what happens from now on, that we live and have lived in a wonderful place at a wonderful time and have lived a wonderful life. This is a time in history that will stand out for ever more, as one of enlightenment, opportunity, experience and discovery.
No matter what your religion, or what your culture, or where you live, we are all brothers, and we are all just riders on this earth together. And this is the best darn ride you will ever get on. Appreciate it every day you wake up, and in everything you do and everything you see. We are the luckiest humans that have ever lived. If you remember that and appreciate this, you will be happy.
The definition of success is anyone that is happy.
