Famine plague and war just lost their five-thousand-year grip on humanity

Most of us carry an old assumption without examining it: that the world is roughly as hungry, sick and violent as it has always been, so there's no real point celebrating or even discussing progress. Yuval Noah Harari opens his account by showing how far that assumption has drifted from the numbers.

For most of history, a bad harvest or a raiding party could wipe out a village. In 1694, about 2.8 million French people, fifteen percent of the population, starved to death in a single stretch of bad weather and hoarded grain. Plague could kill a third of a city within months, as it did in fourteenth-century Florence. War was simply assumed; nations planned for it the way we plan for weather.

Now look at 2014. More than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who were malnourished. In 2010, obesity killed about three million people worldwide, while famine and malnutrition combined killed roughly one million. In 2012, war killed about 120,000 people globally and crime another 500,000, while 800,000 people took their own lives and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar, as Harari puts it, is now more dangerous than gunpowder.

This doesn't mean suffering has vanished, and Harari is careful to say so. Hundreds of millions still go hungry, AIDS and malaria still kill by the million, and wars still devastate Syria and the Congo. But these have shifted from being seen as unavoidable cosmic facts to being treated as failures with a cause, something we investigate, something we expect governments to fix.

Which raises the real question Harari is building toward. History, he argues, does not tolerate a vacuum. If famine, plague and war are receding from the top of the human agenda, something else is bound to take their place. His answer, laid out across the rest of the book, is that humanity's next projects are likely to be immortality, engineered happiness, and something close to godlike power over our own biology. Before we can evaluate whether that is wise, we first have to notice that the agenda has already started to shift.

Start by pulling out a notebook tonight and listing the five things you worry about most, then holding each one up against the numbers Harari cites, famine against obesity, plague against old age, war against suicide, and being honest about which category your fear actually belongs to. Once you've done that, pick one worry that turns out to be a holdover from an older, scarcer world, and consciously downgrade the energy you give it. Then look at where that freed-up attention could go instead, toward whatever genuinely threatens your health, your relationships or your sense of purpose today. Finally, choose one area of ambition, money, achievement, comfort, where you decide in advance what enough looks like, so success stops quietly demanding more of you than it needs to.