Do you want to make the world a better place in your lifetime? Well friends, I've got good and bad news for you. Which do you want to get first? Well, I'll go with the good one first: you're probably going to live a long life. I'm no psychic or anything to make this statement with great level of certainty. This is what's happening to most human beings that are not inhabitants of war zones or other extremely unfortunate life conditions. Even in my country, Brazil, which used to be seen as a very poor one (at least populated with millions of very poor people), average lifespan has gone beyond 70 years old. In rich countries this is even more pronounced, and general life expectancy is increasing more and more. In some cases, average is reaching 80 years of age. People usually say they wanna live long lives. So this is the good news I've had for you.
Time for the bad news (it usually comes eventually). And it is very much related to the good one. When people live that long, disability rates of all sorts go through the roof. World population is getting older. Thus it's also getting increasingly disabled (group number is currently more than a billion people). That happens because medicine has done a terrific job in preventing death from all types of disease, and trauma. But it has been far less efficient in restoring bodily functions that make people live well. A great example is paralysis caused by spinal cord trauma. Prognosis for someone that experiences that in 2015 is not that different from whom would faced the exact same issue a thousand years ago. Of course today very few people can benefit from electronic exoskeletons and other high-tech/high-price solutions. But it's not really restoring body function. It's replacing it at best, with very mixed results. So let me make it a crystal clear for you: if you're really lucky, you will be disabled at some point of your life.
This blog is almost entirely dedicated to show everyone that's interested how leading life with a disability is. So I'm not going to focus much on this here (you can refer to all the other 70+ essays I've published before). Now I'll switch to good news again: because you are not disabled yet, you can still probably change your future with far greater ease than someone that already is disabled. In so doing, you'll improve lives of these folks who are disabled already, but also make your own life much better and easier in the future.
Sure, you can wait for some brilliant scientist to work her ass of for inventing the cure for all the underlying physical disorders that contribute to disable people along with the environment we live in. It's probably the easiest thing to do now. But if you were your current age 50 years ago and had done that, you'd still be waiting for the cure to come.
Don't get me wrong. I really love Kurzweil's landscape of human future. It's based on hard science (which is refreshing per se) and it's rationally very optimistic. Everywhere we look at, it's possible to detect exponential increase in technology advancement. That means projecting the future with a linear mindset (which is usually what people do) will generate a very imprecise picture, to say the least. The world itself can be very complex and hard to anticipate, but, for some reason, our ability to create more powerful technology is not. Therefore, any reasonably accurate prediction about the future should take that into consideration. Problem is that generates leaps we can't fully understand. Because this is not only a quantitative technology revolution. It's also a qualitative social one, in the sense that as price of these tech resources drops, it enables them to be used in very different ways compared to what we currently do.
Unfortunately, young people get disabled too. It happens all the time because of traffic accidents (which are also a leading cause of death in this age group). Again, getting hurt but disabled is actually the second best case scenario. Not to mention your kids that can be born with cerebral palsy, that affects eight babies in 1000 born alive and it's only the most common disability among children. There are several others. In all these cases, you'll have to deal with disability now. And believe me, it sucks.
So my proposal for you is that you selfishly take action now. Help destroying the barriers, physical, cultural, and social that prevent a disabled person to live to her full potential. You can do it out of altruism, or just treat it as a pension plan. In any case, as with saving money when you're young, this is the best time to make most impact because you're not disabled yet. This means the current environment settings don't disproportionately offset your every effort. So do that now! And I promise, with 100% certainty, this will make the world better for every human being on Earth.
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