State of the World (February) - Thoughts from Niels

Niels Lan Doky with his father in Vietnam, 1998, in front of Ho Chi Minh's house

It’s the first Sunday of the month and as some of you already know this is when I try to take a moment to reflect on the state of the world. Waking up this morning here in Elsinore, Denmark is a beautiful experience. It’s a glorious day with clear sky, bright sunshine and a bit of freshly fallen snow. I am reading some nice messages from loved ones before getting out of bed and my fridge is filled with delicious healthy organic locally sourced foods. So all is good from my perspective. 

But when you open the media, a different picture is being painted. Bad news has always sold better than good news and the news industry is a for-profit industry. So there is a lot of bad news out there. In contrast, that's why I love going to Vietnam, where my father is from and where I have been I think around 9 times since 1998. One of the first things I noticed and that struck me the first time I went there was when I read their English language newspapers I realized that the vast majority of the news there was good news! Every day. Stories about successful businesses, citizens doing good or heroic deeds, school kids doing exceptionally well, reports of good results in various business sectors and industries, stories about unexpected medical recoveries, etc. It was so refreshing! My press appearances in connection with my concert performances there were also always overwhelmingly positive. As the son of a Vietnamese father, I am considered Vietnamese so all narratives were typically angled as an international/cosmopolitan/Vietnamese success story. I was later told that this unusual phenomenon of mostly positive news mainly stems from the fact that Vietnam has been at war for so many decades that bad news was no news, i.e. only good news was newsworthy. This tradition has lingered on since the end of the war and I think it is a good thing. I find Vietnamese people to be generally very joyful, positive, proactive and relentless and I am thankful for having inherited those traits. I do think that focusing on the glass being half full rather than half empty has great value.  Can we maybe learn something from this? The world today is in a strange place. And I think the focus on bad instead of good news is a part of the problem. 

Climate change and the collapse of our ecosystem is not really being taken seriously enough by anyone. There are major efforts and innovations being made in this area that are not making the news, for example the development of trees that can grow much faster and absorb far more CO2 from the atmosphere. Maybe celebrating such achievements and milestones as good media worthy news could inspire our collective consciousness to speed up the Green transition. In the area of Biotech the speed of innovation is staggering. Many diseases are well on their way to become eradicated and the reversal of aging is even within reach now. And according to The Economist, a new drug developed by a Danish pharmaceutical company (Novo Nordisk) could cure obesity worldwide, and take with it all of obesity’s side effects and indirect social and economic consequences. Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computers are now at such a highly advanced stage that regulation is needed to avoid the danger of misuse. But the reality is that we now have tools to help us advance and move much faster in all areas of life, and solve problems with complexities of astronomical proportions, i.e. create major positive advancement if we plan and legislate well. And about the war in Ukraine: The news talks mainly about how to WIN the war, not about how to END it. Is a battlefield victory the only way to end it or are there other ways? I would love to see debates and see people develop ideas on how to end it in other ways. Because if part of the cost of victory in a traditional sense is a country completely devastated by war and a generation of children completely traumatized by its consequences, etc. how much of a victory is that really? Imagine what would be AI’s answer to that question, from a purely rational objective, non-emotional, non-ego based perspective? On a smaller scale, but essentially the same dynamic, a hostile divorce between two conflicting parents involving a legal battle over custody of their child, more often than not turns into a ego-battle between the parents, with their child becoming an innocent victim and hostage in the crossfire. But a good professional mediator is often able to direct the focus to the best interest of the child and position this as an extension of the best interest of each of the parents, and create not the ideal solution but the best possible solution, and enable life to continue and the child’s upbringing to resume under the best possible conditions under the given circumstances. Maybe the analogy could be applied to the proxy war between the West and Russia and with Ukraine as a metaphor for the child and the West and Russia as the parents.  What strategy would the best of mediators apply to enable this “divorce” to be finalized and the damage to the child to be minimized? Something to think about. 

What else is going on in the world? The dating scene is not doing well I hear.  The amount of singles has exploded in recent decades. CNN talks about “an epidemic of declining marriage, sexuality, relationships, mating and household formations'' and mentions social media as partially responsible for this trend. Growing inequality too, and the resulting diminishing middle class. We are no longer going out the way we used to. We do everything online from home. We even work from home online. In the US more young women than young men now have college degrees and these women tend to want to date men who have college degrees too. More young women than young men now also own homes and tend to prefer to date men who are at least as financially viable as them, so end up dating older og slightly older men. A dating app like Tinder (that I have never used but I know many people who do) has 3 men for every woman and statistically 90% of the women there are interested in only 10% of the men according to some sources, or 60% and 30% according to CNN. But independently of the exact figures there is clearly an off balance here. Experts brought in by CNN call it “an existential crisis” and say that “this is not going to end well”. Loneliness and social isolation has been linked to those men responsible for mass shootings and other terrible things. On the other end of the scale, a large number of people are of course still succeeding very well in dating and mating, etc.  Maybe some good news stories from that end of the spectrum could be of help and inspiration to the rest? One more thing to think about on this Sunday. 

Wishing everyone a good evening. 
Niels Lan Doky

Elsinore, Denmark 
Sunday, March 5, 2023