Thoughts on progress and the “compressed 21st century” from my speech accepting the Pioneer Award from the University of Pennsylvania.

[Last weekend, I had the great honor of receiving the Pioneer Award in Positive Psychology from UPenn’s Positive Psychology Center, for my work over the years advancing the cause of human flourishing. It was a very special day for me, in part because the legendary Martin Seligman—who founded the positive psych movement and whose work has inspired me in many ways over the years—actually gave me the award.

The story at the center of Extra Life was really the story of a single number, and how it changed over the preceding century: the number of years that the average human could expect to live given the conditions in the world at the time of their birth. In other words, life expectancy. A little more than a hundred years ago, at the end of the last global pandemic, human life expectancy stood at around 35 years. A hundred years later, it was more than 70. In the span of just one century, we managed to double the average human lifespan.