Are We Doing Enough To Solve Global Issues?
If you watch the news or stay up to date on social media you are probably aware of two of the biggest trends today, first that the world has lots of problems, or so it seems, and second, that we are advancing technology and innovation faster than ever.
Have you seen how small 1TB of storage is these days? It’s like the size of a frosted flake.
So why do these two things seem to be so completely disconnected. Why aren’t the smartest minds and companies trying to solve the world’s biggest problems?
Instead, the world’s talent is spending its time finding new ways we can upload pictures online and get services through our smartphones. Meanwhile the world seems to be falling apart around us.
Have you read the news lately?
On one hand we are constantly bombarded with a very bleak and sometimes scary (if not fabricated) view of the world. The Middle East is (seemingly) at a constant battle with itself and the rest of the world. Pollution is starting to have serious impact on the world; Delhi has gone past 20 times the recommended healthy levels of airborne particulate set by the World Health Organization, and we have all seen the dozens of videos of Beijing. Wealth is being concentrated at higher and higher levels every year. There seems to be a mass shooting every day in the United States.
The 2016 U.S. presidential candidates are the Crypt Keeper, two family members of incumbent presidents and Donald Trump. Dire straights my friends, dire straights indeed.
Now, on the other hand there are also lots of exciting thing happening in the world. We are inventing and innovating at a faster pace than ever, and solving problems we never knew we had. Now that Obama gave him permission, Joe Biden is going to cure cancer, finally. Virtual reality seems like it will finally live up to the world’s expectations and change our lives despite Time magazines efforts to make it look stupid. Cars are driving themselves. Tech entrepreneurs are launching rockets into space at a faster rate than governments ever could. Incumbent industries are getting rocked by technology, e.g. the taxi industry. Netflix is now distributing their in-house content to every country in the world sans North Korea, China and Saudi Arabia. That’s more countries than the U.S. has a (public) military presence in. Bruce Jenner became a semi-attractive woman in front of the entire world and all that happened were some people got mad on twitter. The future is now. We are seemingly at the apex of human innovation.
I carefully graphed my personal social media feeds and came up with the following data driven illustration.
So, how can the world seem so bleak at times but so promising at others?
Why is there such a misalignment between the world’s cutting edge innovations and the problems we hear so much about on the news?
The World Isn’t Really On Fire
One of the reasons why there seems to be such a huge disconnect between problem and problem solvers is the world media tends to polarize and exaggerate problems and issues way larger than they actually are.
The news is hyper sensationalized because, well, we like to watch sensational news, and engagement is how media companies make money. The reality is the world isn’t really as bad as it seems on TV. Yes, we have problems that need to be solved, but there are two big things driving a hyperbolic sense of chaos and panic around the world.
For the first time ever, almost every single person on earth has become a source of media information. Every single event that happens around the world is now accessible to be reported on.
During WWI and WWII the only real flow of information was via landline telephone calls, radio and letters, and the main source of information about the war for the world was newspapers. Not online newspaper on your iPad, but actually newspaper, that were printed on paper, that is made from trees.
The world was really only kept to date on huge, milestone changes in the war because that’s as much information as could be reliably put together for the whole world. Families could go for years not knowing if their family members had made it out alive.
Now fast forward to today. Every single person who dies anywhere in the world can instantly become a news headline that’s drives controversy and outrage among the population.
The media has an endless stream of information they can cherry pick from. This allows them to (1) publish way more stories about bad things happening than before, because the information is now available and (2) it allows them to filter only the most sensational stories, which drive more engagement with users, like you and I. These two trends make it seem like the world is worse off because there is comparatively more coverage of all the bad things happening in the world and the stories are more polarized than ever before.
The second, compounding cause of an inflated sense of panic is the fact that the news covers things that are happening versus things that aren’t happening.
Which news line do you think drives more engagement:
“Tornado rips through Oklahoma, killing hundreds”
Or
“We checked again, still no tornadoes in North Carolina, it’s actually pretty nice weather”
We tend to misunderstand the distribution of good versus bad things happening in the world because bad things not happening doesn’t make good news. Yes, you get the occasional puff peace about a woman who saved a dog orphanage or some charity work done by a celebrity, but media coverage severely misrepresents the distribution, which ends up influencing people’s world view negatively.
The best cure to this syndrome I have found is to travel. To see the countries and people and places in real life and not through the lens of main stream media gives you a much better view of where the world actually stands.
I take around four international flights a month, to mostly emerging markets and can assure you the world is not a dark, terrifying place it seems on TV.
The world would be a much better place if every person had to live in a different country for a year.
We Tend to Marginalize People Who Work on Global Problems
In modern culture, especially start up culture, the likes of Silicon Valley, we tend to marginalize and stigmatize people who work on the world’s biggest problem. It’s not sexy or cool.
Name the world’s hottest startup trying to reduce global emissions pollution
The unicorn that’s helping make politics more transparent
The jetsetter, 27-year-old CEO who’s going to revolutionize global education
We have names for people who want to fix the world’s problems: bleeding hearts, NGOs, hippies. They are the reason a global market for Quinoa exists, right? You sit down at the dinner table and dread having to listen to your cousin talk about helping provide clean water access in a developing country. Meanwhile you are oozing with tech entrepreneur pride about the new pizza delivery app you built, “It’s going to literally change the world; I am the Elon Musk of pizza.”
This marginalization drives talented people away from challenging to fix the world. We as humans have a tendency to build a large portion of our identify from our career or line of work (for better or worse). It’s cooler to start a company that pushes humanity into new and unknown frontiers than to fix the existing problems.
Everyone wanted to be with Lewis and Clark exploring the great unknown, cause hell, maybe you’d get killed by Indians but maybe they will name a river after you. Nobody wanted to be the guy left behind in charge of cleaning horse stables and fixing all the butter churns.
Being a hero is way cooler than being a caretaker. Every story we have heard for our entire lives has portrayed these archetypes and made it very clear. Hero’s get the lady, hero’s live the high life, they make the big bucks and call the shots. They boldly lead humanity into the unknown. The caretakers can have whatever is leftover.
The reality is we need the world’s heros to spend a little less time creating new things and a little more time fixing the problems that threaten to upend our cozy life on earth.
Have you ever gone outside in a city with 400+ PSI? I can tell you that hoverboards and fifty different ways to interact with friends via social media doesn’t replace the human need for oxygen.
When was the last time we cured a major disease? The 19th century tackled almost every major cause of death, increasing human life span by almost 50%.
Our generation has the potential to be the first in recorded history to systemically live shorter lives than our parents. Is that really the cost of progress? Or more importantly, Is that progress at all?
Globalization and Nationalism Are Conflicting Concepts
In the last twenty years the internet has launched society into a state of globalization without ever asking if we were ready and prepared for it.
A truly global world is starting to force questions we have never had to think of before. The internet blurs the lines between sovereign nations and challenges the power and roles of national governments and institutions.
Issues like immigration, human rights, economic equality and government efficacy are now being had on a global stage and we are struggling as a human race to have effective conversations about these topics.
The Syrian refugee crisis illustrates just how ill-prepared we are to deal with challenges as a global community. We are still approaching global problems with nationalist solutions. The “us vs. you” mentality is still solidly the status quo.
Nationalism is mostly caused by limiting someone’s exposure to other cultures, languages, people and places, and tends to be a very strong and immovable article of most people’s identity.
Most people have a healthy sense of nationalism because of the environment they grew up in. They grew up in the country they were born, by two parents who are also born in that country and went to school with a bunch of kids similar to them and teachers who valued the same things their parents valued.
There is nothing inherently wrong with nationalism, but it makes it almost impossible to tackle truly global issues effectively because at the end of the day each nation of the world is always going to act in their own best interest.
Media actually perpetuates nationalism by streaming world events through a carefully managed filter that crafts an antagonist and protagonist into otherwise objective stories. Try reading news headlines of world events from different countries to see how different they can be.
Is it possible for us to ever change this? I’m not sure, but it’s worth having an informed conversation about. The same way as modern society couldn’t be effectively managed with the world’s old institutions, imaging how mad feminists would be about a Pharoah, I don’t believe society can perpetuate and prosper without evolving.
So, instead of continuing to create news ways to distract and entertain ourselves, we as a community of young, driven, talented, smart, leader of the future need to start having these tough conversations.
The world will soon be ours to lead. Do we really want to lead it the way our grandparents and parents did?
