
Ask HN: I'm 20, naive and want to save the world. How? - ess3
Right now I&#x27;m in a state of apathy regarding the current status of the world&#x27;s health. I only see problems not solutions. What do you do to get the feeling of contributing to a better world?
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llomlup
First, while it's a noble goal, to save the world requires a position of
power. So, your goal is to obtain some power. The problem with power is that
it corrupts, and it may happen that once you yield significant amount of
power, you may not want to use it as you may have originally intended to,
because it might be too risky and as a result, you could lose it.

Second - thus, your goal now is to maintain the achieved level of power and
look for ways to enlarge it.

Keep in mind that many people don't really care about the good in the world,
let alone saving it. Their perspective is a personal one, I'd say even a
selfish one.

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tomhoward
I can strongly recommend consuming some of Jordan Peterson's material,
particularly this video blog "My Message to Millenials: How to Change the
World – Properly" [1]

His central message: the key to changing or fixing the world is to understand
and fix yourself, deeply and thoroughly.

It resonated with me as I've been on a similar quest to work out how to "save
the world" since my early adulthood. It took me till a few years ago (15-20
years after I started trying to "save the world") to realise that this was
what I really needed to do.

It's a hard journey but an incredibly important one, as it requires becoming
fully honest with one's self and everyone else, and becoming humble and
realistic about what is possible for one person to achieve.

But as Peterson says, once you do this, you'll notice your little corner of
the world starting to change around you. You then realise that if enough
people in the world did this, the major problems of the world would quickly
sort themselves out, so the next step is to help and empower others to do the
same thing - but only those who have chosen to do so (trying to help people
who don't want to be helped is futile and destructive).

Another piece of advice: read (or read about) the classics - ancient
philosophy (especially Seneca) and mythology, along with Enlightenment/post-
Enlightenment philosophers like David Hume, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

The most important thing to recognise is that at a fundamental level, the
problems being faced by the world now are not altogether new, and for most of
what we're struggling with now, people were struggling with different versions
of the same things, hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Which is not to say we should despair and give up.

But we should understand the what's gone before us and what's deep inside of
us before we start trying to prescribe solutions to today's global problems.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbOeO_frzvg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbOeO_frzvg)

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imaginenore
You can't. Even if you were a billionaire, the world is huge, populated, and
is controlled by all kinds of people and companies (of various degrees of
madness and power thirst).

Pick one small problem and try and solve it, or improve it. Example: excessive
CO₂ in the atmosphere. Possible solution: figure out how to plant fast-growing
plants on a massive scale, ideally in deserts.

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bigblind
"Saving the world" is a very vague mission statement. Get a clearer vision of
what you want to achieve.

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jmnicolas
Change scale : you probably can't help people in far distant places but look
at the world around you there are a lot of people that could use some help /
care even if they don't die of hunger.

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jonny_storm
There will always be problems, but for a certain kind of person, this is
ideal; there will always be problems to _solve_.

Do you believe your apathy is an obstacle to solving problems? Or have you
simply not found a problem you care enough about? Or do you mean that you feel
overwhelmed by the number and severity of problems you perceive in the world?
Or are you actually discouraged by a perceived inability to see solutions to
problems? These are all different concerns, and while it isn't clear to me
which (if any) of these are yours, I will try to address all of them.

As objectionable as some may find this, apathy (in the sense of being unable
to summon deep concern for problems not affecting you directly) is not
necessarily an obstacle to solving problems, but it certainly can be an
obstacle to solving them well. You can care a great deal about the solution to
a problem while caring little for the effect it has on others, but the less
isolated the problem (the more people affected), the less likely it is your
solution will solve the problem for everyone, or solve it adequately. Indeed,
it is entirely possible to make a problem much worse or create a multitude of
new problems without taking great care to avoid such things. There is some
question as to whether it's possible to change anything whatsoever without
doing some kind of violence in the world, and I advise you seek to minimize
the violence you inflict however you can. Still, if you're genuinely concerned
about an overabundance of apathy, know that a dose of compassion can help, and
compassion can be cultivated. (On the subject of doing harm without meaning
to, consider Zizek's _Violence_.)

Whatever your level of worldly concern, you'll still need motivation. What
problems move you will be unique to your character and experiences, but I
promise you: if nothing is appealing to you, you will need start working first
and wait for motivation later. This may be disquieting and counter to
intuition, but just as smiling triggers mirror neurons that can lead us to
feel happy, so too can working on a problem cause us to care about it. By
this, I don't necessarily mean toiling away at a keyboard in isolation; I mean
you need to be steeped in the problem. Convince yourself the problem you
perceive actually exists by meeting the people who experience it, first hand.
Confuse yourself by meeting the people who don't. Understand how others have
attempted to solve the problem. Too often you'll find the problem you
perceived at the beginning was not a problem at all, and the real problem, if
one even exists, is something else entirely. This is important work--far more
important than crafting a solution--because you are working to find the right
problem to solve.

Once you begin to comprehend the true depth and complexity of a problem, you
can easily be overwhelmed by the many sub-problems and their intricacies. Here
you must decide what you can do that would have the greatest impact, form a
hypothesis regarding how it can be done, and begin iterating toward a solution
in small steps. There is an absurd amount of literature on dealing with the
many facets of such an enterprise, and I won't try to enumerate all that I've
seen here, but I will urge you to exercise humility and generosity in whatever
decisions you make. I rather liked the methodology presented in _The Lean
Startup_ , though it probably could have been condensed to an essay.

Finally, if you simply can't think of solutions, I suggest doing three things:
solve other, smaller, simpler problems; read more about things related to the
problem; read more about things _prima facie_ unrelated to the problem. As for
specific tactics, Polya's _How to Solve It_ is never a bad place to start.
Anything by Michael Michalko is probably worth reading, as well.

Whatever you decide, I wish you well in your endeavors!

