Afraid

I could easily glide in the corporate world for another ten years, accumulate a couple of million dollars (or more!), and happily retire at age fifty.
How could I retire, you ask? I could live in Europe, or South East Asia, with every comfort, just with the interest earned from a couple million dollars properly invested.
I could do it. It would be… easy.

And instead, something inside me is screaming that I need to live a different life.

I have a dream.
I should try to fulfill it.
And I’m scared as shit.

The Dream

For the past 18 years or so, I’ve been fascinated by architecture, urbanism, and how cities have an impact on the lives of many people, and on our environment.

The current model is broken. The way we build and operate cities is wrong. And it’s getting worse.

Yes, we love being next to each other, because proximity helps the exchange of ideas, and fuels collaboration. But the world can’t sustain billions of people living “the American dream”. The ice caps are melting. The world is going to be destroyed if we don’t do something.

A different model. A sustainable model. A fair model.
We should build cities where cars don’t exist and transportation is automated and properly designed.
Cities where erecting buildings doesn’t pollute that much, and operating these buildings doesn’t pollute that much either.
Cities where our ecological footprint remains small, and where it’s easy to connect to everybody.
Cities where everybody can afford to live in, no matter what job they have.
Today, if you are a waiter or a postman or a driver in San Francisco or New York, you can’t afford to live there.
And so you commute, and you waste your life, and you pollute, and you destroy your mental health, and ruin your relationships.
A fair society should allow its citizens to live a decent life, which means everyone should afford to live decently, close to work and to friends and loved ones.

I would like to build this amazing city. I would like everybody to be inspired by it, and have hundreds of cities like it spread around the globe, and change the way the world goes, for the better.
I would like to change the world.

But I’m realistic. Few people in history have really changed the world. And I am an ordinary guy. Maybe smart, maybe capable, maybe skilled, maybe connected, maybe with a good sense of how to build an organization. And when I was a little guy, I wanted one day to become “the Pope”. I had ambition already back then.
But… How can I “build a city”? How could I assemble billions of dollars to build it, and then why should people live in it?
How stupid is it to even think that’s possible?

That’s why I’m scared. Because maybe, very soon, I’ll start doing it anyway.
An old guy once said that even the longest journey starts with a single step.
The first step is easy, even when the journey is almost impossible to complete.

What’s next?

I don’t know yet. I have many ideas, but I have to decide what to do.
Stay tuned, maybe soon enough I’ll be able to share more.