When humanity disappoints
be cynically hopeful
I won’t lie. I have a love-hate paradoxical relationship with humanity that co-relates to the relationship I have with myself. On one hand I observe our self-destructive behavior with disenchanted apathy, on the other hand I desire to do whatever I can to contribute towards our progress forward.
I think we deserve what we deserve, so I wouldn’t be too upset if we combust into extinction. I am terribly cynical, and recent events have not convinced me otherwise that we are worthy of inheriting this earth, but I am also hopeful.
How is that possible?
We don’t really require buy-in from the majority
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead
Often it is easy to fall into despair because we just have to look at the world and scan news headlines to be utterly convinced that we are really doomed for extinction. But in my short life I have witnessed a tremendous amount of progress formerly expected to take much longer or to be impossible. Momentum-gathering tipping points creep up on us unaware, so do great inspirational leaders capable of shifting mass mindsets.
We are terrible at prediction, as Nassim Nicolas Taleb likes to remind us.
The world is shifting quicker than can anticipate
We like to measure the world based on our own colored lenses, and the rate of progress we are used to, in our own lifetimes and socio-economic patterns. We forget that great economies rise and fall that look like tiny dots in the grand scheme of things. It would have been inconceivable to think that the British empire that was so powerful in the early 1900s would one day fall. Power shifts are never gradual.
Who is to say that the world we live in today would stay the same in ten years, much less fifty? Yes, we live in a horribly distributed world with massive inequality. But it is also easy to forget that we have made a whole ton of progress considering it wasn’t too long ago that even the basic right to education was an elitist, male-dominated privilege.
Those alive now will soon be replaced
My parents’ generation will never understand how it feels like to have that sense of liberation when I first interacted with the internet during my teenage years, just like I will never understand how it feels like to grow up with an iPad. What is it like to have the power of information at your fingertips as soon as you begin crawling?
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. — Douglas Adams
I am the most hopeful when the younger generations demonstrate what they are capable of:
- 15-year-old develops a test for pancreatic cancer
- 22-year-old trying to invent wireless power charging
- 15 year old from Sierra Leone engineering batteries out of trash
- tons more if you google young kids changing the world
We can say what we want about the perceived perils of technology, but it has brought great awareness and a wide range of distributed knowledge to our people. There is so much information, so many diverse voices telling their own unique stories, that it will be an increasing challenge to be in front of all of this and not develop a sense of connection, empathy and justice to the rest of the world. It will become an impossible intellectual choice to remain bigoted and selfish when intellectual awareness points the other way — that in order for us to flourish, diversity and being connected to each other is the best way to move forward.
The incentive to personally contribute
Let’s assume that the world is going to end, and we’re heading for self-destruction in approximately 50 years, if not earlier. I can choose to sit here and think all day that we are terrible human beings, which sounds incredibly boring to do for the next few decades of my life. I would choose to opt out if I could, for unlike most people I don’t have much interest in survival per se.
Since I can’t opt-out and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being angry at my own species, the fundamentally right thing to do is to do everything in my capacity to tip the balance the way I want the world to tip.
If the world doesn’t end, I can be extremely proud of my species and myself, because my species didn’t fail me and I didn’t just sit there complaining and wait to die. If the world ends, at the very least, my species can fail me but I didn’t fail myself.
Either way, I still win.
The worst thing to do, is to slowly die inside, while the world around me is dying too.
