Somewhere, someone may still have a copy of an essay that I wrote in primary school… about the year 2000.

The kids in my class laughed. (No, that didn’t make me angry.)

Now these things are starting to happen, a little later than I anticipated.

I’ve also predicted that we’ll be using CRISPR and fish genes so that we can change the color of our skin like putting on new clothes and be done with so-called racial discrimination. (So-called because race is a cultural concept. There is only one human species and a wide range of diversity, which is the spice of human life.) It’s already been done with cats and other mammals, making them fluorescent in the dark, though the ability to change the color is going to be a challenge.

I’ve been looking back at my life and was astonished to see how often I was hit by sheer bad luck, mere negative coincidences, things that happened, sometimes without me being aware of at the time. I’m wondering what I can still do with that, and what it all means, if anything, whether I could have done some things differently, responded differently.

And then I see this and I despair. What is going to become of the over 50,000 children who disappeared within the EU within a period of three years? The actual number is likely much higher, researchers say.

Then this.

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Yes, I know that the news makes us depressed these days. There is so much negative news that people now apparently do things like consider education in their own country very bad – but not their own children’s education – and consider the economy very bad – but not their own situation. (Surveys reveal this.) They seem to be basing their opinions on negative news that they read, not on their own experiences.