Another year has gone… and what a year…

Yesterday we’ve been watching one of those “year in review” series and it struck us how many bad things happened in 2016. It wasn’t a good year for the Earth and everyone living on it.

But what disturbed us the most is how we’ve gotten so numb. The TV kept beaming images of bombed buildings, dying children and people leaving everything they have in search for a safe place into our living room and we look at it as if it’s not real. As if, if we just ignore it, it will all go away.

But it won’t.

We can keep looking back at all the things that have gone wrong, but more important is to look forward. How can we make the world of 2017 a better place than the one in 2016?

We’re not going to ask you to stop using all kinds of fossil fuels or to quit your job and go helping people in Syria (although you’d be our hero if you did).

We are going to wish you some things that require little effort but can make a huge difference.

We wish you to have the heart to be nice.

Some will call it Karma, others call it a commandment and others will call it something else. But you can find it in every religion and philosophy. Be nice to others and others will be nice to you.

We wish for 2017 that you will smile more to strangers. Say hello to them and wish them a nice day.

Don’t think in terms of race or age or wealth, consider everyone else as your equal and treat them like that.

There’s so much anger and fear in the world these days, don’t let it overtake your mindset. Remember that the number of bad people is still a fraction of the number of good ones. Act like that. Show people that you’re one of the good guys and that you believe that they are too.

We wish you to have the mind to distinguish genuine from fake.

We have always seen the internet and social media as a blessing. It was a chance for us to become worldly. For a very long time we had to trust on what the established media told us but the last 20 years we could discover the opinions from literally everyone.

2016 was the first year we started to doubt this.

Populism is everywhere and never has there been so much propaganda. People are spammed with fake news and fake facts and we tend to believe what we want to believe.

We wish that you will be able to find your way through this jungle of right and wrong and everything in between.

Before you follow someone’s opinion, think about the background, about what’s behind the things they say.

We wish you have the courage to try something new.

We’re getting more and more comfortable. We have big screen TVs on which we can see the whole world tack sharp. We can order everything online, delivered on our doorstep the next morning. We can go on holiday to an all-in resort in Haiti without seeing anything of the misery of the country.

Never before has it been so comfortable in our comfort zone.

So comfortable that we tend to become our own prisoners.

Try something new once in a while. Go to a different store, change your outfit, eat something you’ve never eaten before, travel to a far away country, go to that naked restaurant in London, jump out of an airplane (with parachute), get a new job, put your smartphone away for a week, start gardening, make a baby, whatever.

Do something that opens your eyes, that gets your adrenaline pumping, that makes you feel alive.

We wish you have an amazing 2017!