An All Encompassing Idea
There are so many people solving so many problems in the world, small or big. Only a few of these ideas tend to immediately (in the matter of a few years) impact a significant amount of the human population. Examples of these are Amazon, Facebook, and Google who all have products with billions of searches, logins, and buys every year. When we talk about the internet, buying, connecting, and searching all seem to be fundamental needs/conveniences which make our lives much easier. Obviously there is great contreversy about how they impact our lives with documentaries such as The Social Dilemma being perfect storytellers here but that isn’t what I’ll be talking about in this post.
I’m trying to hone in on ideas that are as essential to us as buying, connecting, and searching are on the internet. I’ve always had the thought in my head that when we have a limited amount of years to live, spending so much time working on some idea that solves an incredibly focused problem rather than one fundamental to our living/surviving on this planet or others as a species is somewhat of a waste of time. I think it’s probably unfair to say this just because there are obviously tons of “smaller” scale problems to solve which allow us to more effectively tackle these larger extinction-level issues. But, for some reason I’ve felt this sort of thing a lot. To me, two of these bigger issues that come to the top of my head are deeply-rooted inequality (issues that step from opinions of politicians, economic inequality, etc.) and global warming (our clean energy usage and our depletion of many of Earth’s resources). While I realize I obviously have to start at a smaller scale and solve issues I think I have a chance of solving now, these are two issues I’m going to keep thinking about since I know they must be solved in the near future. Or else we’re screwed.