Songwriting vs. songcatching
No creation is ever pure emergence or pure design. Acts of genius require both fertile ground and someone planting and tending to a seed.
Humanity eradicates malaria
Malaria has been one of the biggest scourges on humanity for millennia and mostly kills babies and infants. However, through the widespread dissemination of a vaccine developed in the 2020s and other mechanisms, global efforts to eradicate perhaps the deadliest disease known to humanity finally find resounding success. In the 20th century alone, malaria claimed between 150 million and 300 million lives, accounting for 2-5% of all deaths globally. By the halfway point of the 21st century, these deaths had been effectively eliminated.
Sacrifice what you like for what you love
We simply cannot do it all. We cannot do everything we’d like to do without burning ourselves out. So we must choose to let many things go to more fully choose our highest vision of who we are and what we are here to offer.
You’re not going to find your purpose
Purpose is like a garden. When we are feeling a lack of purpose, we don’t go out in the woods digging for it. We simply plant some seeds, pull some weeds, water (but not too much), and give it time.
Humanity reaches peak food waste
Though food waste rose for decades as more people around the world grew more affluent (and thus more willing and able to waste), total global food waste finally begins to decline due to new policies and increased consumer awareness.
There is no life purpose
At best, you can have a clear, powerful purpose for this chapter of your life and career. And that chapter might end five years from now and it might end tomorrow.
Humanity ends the HIV/AIDS epidemic
Through the development of effective, safe vaccines and treatment plans and reliable ways to send care to poor and rural populations, the world’s nations effectively eliminate HIV as a cause of death worldwide. As of 2023, over 42 million people had died of HIV-related causes since the beginning of the epidemic. By the 2050s, such deaths become mostly a thing of the past.
I am not enough
Let’s stop subjecting ourselves to this pointless, unwinnable battle against enough. Instead, let’s consider what we might do with our lives if we didn’t actually have anything to prove in the first place.
The Sacred Valley
I was in my late 20s, traveling in Peru for a work conference. Once the conference ended, I took a solo excursion from Lima to the Sacred Valley near the ancient Incan cities of Cusco and Machu Picchu
The myth of bigger impact
When we chase bigger impact, we often end up applying and reinforcing the current system’s broken logic to social change. We end up recreating the same toxicity that got us here in the first place.