5 Reasons for Hope in 2024

I wonder in what frame of mind you’ve started 2024? Perhaps with a spring in your step, invigorated for the year ahead after a restful holiday. Perhaps with lingering burnout which hasn’t quite deserted you. Or perhaps simply with a sense of routine as you return back to regular rhythms of life.

However you’ve started it on a personal level, it is fairly obvious that 2024 has started off miserably for the world at large. War, poverty and natural disasters don’t stop for Christmas and have a ‘reset’ at New Year. Warmongers don’t make use New Year as a springboard for reformation. Situations rumble on and, in many cases, escalate without warning.

Yet, I can see a few key reasons for political and societal hope in 2024 and I want to share them here. This will not be a ‘Pollyanna’ article, oblivious to problems which are right in front of our faces. Instead, it will look at the rivulets of opportunity running alongside the gnarly paths we find ourselves walking on.

So, five reasons for hope:

1) Perspective: I want to start with a thought about perspective. Considering perspective is something which has often been of use to me on a personal level. Contrary to advice which is often doled out, I don’t think it’s really about comparing a current situation with the worst possible situation and saying: ‘At least we’re not experiencing that.’ Rather, it is the combination of knowing that the current situation is survivable and you know it’s survivable because of past experience. Having that knowledge means you know there is reasonable room for improvements to occur. Perspective is something for us to consider when bad news seems to bombard our screens every single day.

2) Elections: After the last few years, it would not perhaps be surprising if many in the UK relate to the famous Brenda clip when thinking about a general election - ‘Not another one!’. And yet, a poll undertaken in October 2023 shows that nearly three-quarters of UK voters want the general election by the spring. There’s a sense of wanting to get it done and dusted, rather than experiencing a year of anticipation and mud-slinging.

But the UK is far from the only election on the cards this year. In fact, with at least 64 countries heading to the polls, 2024 is being called the ‘biggest election year in history’. All in all, an estimated four billion people are eligible to vote. Now, whilst we know that not all these elections will be democratic in the full sense of the word, we can take encouragement from two factors – firstly, that at least many of them are democratic and secondly, that elections can have a positive effect of bringing about fresh perspectives. For countries where the same parties have been in power for years and have potentially run out of steam after overseeing a host of global crises, this freshness could be particularly powerful.

Given the location of some of these elections – e.g. the US, the EU, India, the UK and many countries across Africa - we can also perhaps expect to see some shifting of relations on the world stage. It's hard to predict, but there is certainly the potential of some warming of relations between more traditionally friendly blocs.

So, whilst the reality of this vision is yet to be seen, we can hope for the positivity that fresh agendas can bring and the increased dialogues between political parties and the wider public/industry as they seek to communicate their policy purpoes.

3) Artificial Intelligence: Controversial, I know, especially writing on a day where the International Monetary Foundation predicts that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will hit 40% of jobs. But the progression of AI is here to stay - even its biggest critics can’t ignore it. Last year, I was sat next to someone at a conference who worked for a major healthcare company. I was transfixed as she told me some of the incredible advances being made through AI in the world of medicine. From the speed of analysing results to the mechanics of robotic technologies in complex surgeries, the developments in the medical AI field are incredible. Add in AI’s potential to predict disease and aid the personalisation of medicine, and the possibilities are dazzling.

And medicine is only one field where AI is advancing for societal good - there are so many more! Whilst we, of course, shouldn’t ignore concerns around AI in terms of regulation and job security, there are ever-evolving developments in thinking on how to regulate AI well. Attention is also being given to creating 'jobs of the future' where AI is a smart tool to support progress - a partner to human work, rather than a dectrator of it.

4) Compassion: It can sometimes be hard to believe in compassion in a world which seems to be intent on tearing itself apart in some quarters...but compassion and kindness can be found everywhere when you simply look for it. Take Marlene Engelhorn, the Austrian heiress who is setting up a citizens’ group to decide how to spend Є25m of her inheritance. In a statement, she said: “Many people struggle to make ends meet with a full-time job, and pay taxes on every euro they earn from work. I see this as a failure of politics, and if politics fails, then the citizens have to deal with it themselves.”

Additionally, the charity sector has never been more vital in these times - whether advocating for increased overseas aid, supporting those without a roof over their head, improving end-of-life care or supporting small businesses to thrive despite difficult economic circumstances. The Charities Aid Foundation surveys the most charitable countries in the world and the most recent results are fascinating. Using the metric of the share of adult population who said they had donated money to a charity in the past month, Myanmar and Indonesia take first and second place respectively at 83% and 82% (primarily thought to be due to the influence of certain Buddhist practices) and the UK comes third at 71%, followed very closely by Ukraine at 70%. As Brits we can often be quite self-deprecating - often rightly so - but this particular survey surely gives us the right to feel some encouragement at the generosity in many people's hearts.

5) Education: ‘Education, education, education’. If we’ve brought back David Cameron to run the Foreign Office, I can resurrect a Blair quote or two, right? Education is everything. If we aren’t intentionally investing in the future skills and attitudes of the generations to come, all of the progress we may make now is for nothing. For example, LinkedIn discovered last year that one in three UK job postings require ‘green’ skills which only one in eight workers currently have. If we are serious about hitting sustainability goals in the future, how can this be attained with such a huge gap in applicable skills? Or how can we move forward in the process of digitalization of systems to bring them into the 21st century when digital exclusion is still so prevalent? There are many countries now waking up to the realities of these skills gaps and taking active steps to correct the imbalances in education programmes.

You may have noticed that the first letter of each of my five reasons for hope spells out a word which describes what most of us all yearn for, not only for our own lives, but for the whole world – peace. There is a verse in the Bible which urges the reader to ‘seek peace and pursue it’. The other week, I went to watch One Life, the incredible story of Sir Nicholas Winton – a man who worked with a team of friends and family to rescue 669 children from (then) Czechoslovakia in 1939. His actions and initiative spared those children from experiencing the Holocaust. Here's a quote from him which I find particularly powerful:

“There is a difference between passive goodness and active goodness, which is, in my opinion, the giving of one’s time and energy in the alleviation of pain and suffering. It entails going out, finding and helping those in suffering and danger, and not merely in leading an exemplary life, in a purely passive way of doing no wrong.”

There is still hope for 2024, even with the start we have had – but hope will only be realized when the peacemakers act. Whatever your sphere of influence, be that peacemaker.