on December 19, 2023
We’ve reached the end of another year, and what a year it has been! Although 2023 wasn’t a perfect year (what year is?), it contained many positive events, innovations, people, and moments. I could dwell on the negative aspects of the past year, but what would that accomplish? We’re faced with enough negative news as it is (see my past blog post on the “doom and gloom” news media), and I would rather infuse my readers with a little hope.
To me, hope is a necessary aspect of life. Without hope, you flounder, you become despondent and unsure of your path forward. It’s difficult to function day-to-day when you lack hope. On the other hand, when you choose to hope (and I do believe it is a choice), you give yourself a reason to keep going, to keep moving forward. You start to notice the positivity in the world and the goodness all around you. It is a force that propels you forward and infuses you with optimism.
Read more about HOPE (one of the three pillars of Self-Wealth) in my past blog posts.
When I think about hope in 2023, and going forward into the new year, I think about all the forces that try to erase our hope. Negative people in our lives, the mainstream media, social media—these are all powerful daily influences that can make us doubt the goodness and vitality of the world.
I encourage you to stop listening, or at least limit your daily exposure to these negative forces, because they are often wrong in their doomsday forecasting. For example, what happened to the “huge recession” everyone was talking about for 2023? Headline after headline after headline predicted a catastrophic recession this past year. It never happened. Instead, the stock market had a robust year, with the S&P 500 Index up by 16.39% as of the writing of this article. Additionally, the US Department of Treasury recently issued a statement saying, “The U.S. economy in 2023 outperformed expectations along three key dimensions: growing economic output, labor market resilience, and slowing inflation.”
We didn’t experience the recession everyone was predicting, and those who ignored the negative forecasting and continued with business-as-usual (and investing-as-usual) prospered.
In other positive news, this was a banner year for alternative energy, studies have found that children are reading more, and scientists have successfully treated advanced Parkinson’s. Even though the world is experiencing its share of turmoil and strife, there are many glimmers of positivity and hope out there, if you simply choose to look for them.