Dear Reader,

Many people like to state that they are “born in the wrong century”, implying that they would be best suited for a more traditional, romantic, utopic era of the past when humanity and manners were different and better.

I am not willing to question their claims, but I have the feeling that these assertions move from wrong assumptions. It is in fact both a curse and a blessing that our memory often coats the past with a glossy veneer of nostalgia, making us forget its worse parts.

For example, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. We rarely realise that before the twentieth century, children died en masse because of illnesses that are now considered trivial. I would have been already dead before I made it to elementary school myself.

Social matters are not much different: speaking of Italy (my country), I will present a list of facts without comments:

  • Women’s right to vote was decreed only in 1945
  • The death penalty was administered for the last time in 1947
  • The Parliament abolished “Rehabilitating marriage” (the possibility, for a raper, to be atoned by marrying the victim) in 1981

For many other examples of how the world is getting better and better globally, open a random page of Factfulness by the late great Hans Rosling.

So, would I like to go back more than 80 years in the past, because I think manners were more refined, the music was purer, art more ecstatic, humanity was more honest or whatever other myth I may have in mind?

To put it simply, no.

However, I do have a strong feeling that I was born in the wrong century.

I was born too soon.

I have the impression that humanity is going through an endless purgatory, that we are not yet ready to make Earth the paradise it could be. Maybe in a few centuries or millennia, we could get over all the manifestly stupid and unjust tortures we inflict on our species.

Our yearly “humanity performance review” has shameless faults in discrimination, injustice, poverty, and war.

I want to go past that. I would love to see all the wrong left behind. Yet, I must live in the present, so I can only hope to change matters while history is in the making, not when it has already happened.

I wonder how much suffering we still have to witness, how many tears we have yet to shed.

Until next time, give peace a chance.