Tired of Doomscrolling?

Being a human in the 21st century often feels  frustrating. We are clearly at the high point  

of our species – never have so many of us lived so well, been so healthy and well off. At the same time life is  

incredibly hard – more than 15 thousand children  died yesterday, 700 million people live in extreme  

poverty, even within rich societies there is loads  of unfairness and daily struggle. We are divided,  

unable to solve our problems while creating  new ones, destroying our world in the process.

In many ways the vibe is that we live  in dark times. It is so easy to feel  

disconnected and powerless in the face of  problems too big to solve. And so the state  

of the world fills many of us with doom,  hopelessness and sadness. We feel it too.  

It is one of the most pervasive stories of  our time and there is a lot of truth to it.

But as Terry Pratchett said, we are the  storytelling ape, we think in narratives  

and live in a network of stories that make up  our world. So without minimising the darkness,  

we want to add a story that we find  helpful for dealing with the world.  

This is subjective and not a science  video, so you don’t need to buy into it.

Our story begins with the  first moment that ever was.

14 billion years ago time and space began from  some kind of state of pure energy. From this  

very first moment the universe grew  and evolved. Things that were one  

became many. Energy turned into forces and  particles, out of chaos emerged the laws of  

nature. From these ingredients stars arose,  gigantic engines, turning simple stuff into  

complex stuff only to die violently  and spread the new complexity around.

Out of this more complex stuff,  new stars and more worlds emerged,  

repeating the cycle until most of the simple  stuff was used up and most stars that will  

ever be born had been born. And then, on one  planet, where the conditions were just right,  

dead particles and molecules combined to make  another jump in complexity. Maybe the laws that  

govern everything were destined to make life  happen. Maybe it was just a cosmic dice throw.

But life, now the most complex thing in existence,  wasted no time and spread to even the tiniest  

corners. For billions of years cells held on,  fighting against the elements and each other,  

evolving in the process. Until one day they came  together and made another jump in complexity,  

to plants, animals and fungi. First  in the oceans, then on the land.

Earth was now the stage of something grand,  a complexity acceleration machine going at  

full speed. Millions of new species emerged and  vanished. Life was beaten down over and over,  

but every time it came back stronger. Resettling  niches filled with corpses of the ones that came  

before. Most of these beings are hidden in  time forever, we only know their faint echoes.

Until a few million years ago an animal  looked at the night sky. It looked at its  

hands. It saw its reflection in a puddle. And it  realised it existed. That it was alive. Here and  

now. You probably had such a moment as a small  child, mundane and majestic at the same time. 

This is where the human story begins, about  six million years ago, with the hominins.  

Still just another animal among many others.  They split into many families and lineages  

evolving further or disappearing again. But for  some reason their evolutionary niche enabled  

their brains to grow and they learned more about  this strange world. They prayed to the stars,  

they tamed fire and turned stones into tools.  They celebrated and cried together. Life was  

hard and brutally short but together they  endured – probably by telling themselves  

stories about the world. For almost 250,000  generations they built a biological foundation.

And then, at some point 200,000  years or about 10,000 generations  

ago they became us. Humanity had arrived.

Our ancestors did not waste any time.  Their world was still hard and unforgiving,  

but out of pure stubbornness they did not  accept that. They wanted their lives to be  

better. So they made better tools and learned to  preserve their knowledge beyond death. Progress  

started slow. And then suddenly they (or better WE) made the planet our own. Agriculture and  

the first villages and temples snowballed  into civilization. Kingdoms and empires,  

technology, writing, astronomy, medicine,  philosophy. A hot second later, science,  

industrialization, the modern world,  the information age where we are today.

Earth is truly ours now.

We changed it in ways unfathomable a few  short generations ago. We turned the land  

into fields worked by millions of machines,  built thousands of gigantic jungles made of  

sand and metal. We split the atom and travelled  to other worlds. Everything is different today.

Except us of course. We humans have  not changed. We were molded by a  

cold and unforgiving world, where  we needed to be hard and brutal  

to survive. We are all still bound to  our nature that made us so successful.

We still tell stories, are hungry  for food, greedy for resources,  

desperate to be accepted by our peers. We are  scared by the dangers that lurk in the dark,  

imagined and real ones. We are still brutal to  each other and the animals we hold power over.  

We are still territorial and possessive,  we fear losing what we have, and we fear  

change. We downplay the damage we cause and  ignore the people in need outside our tribes.

Humans are not nice and if we look at our  history, how could we expect ourselves to  

be? In nature we see great beauty but  also endless violence and struggle,  

devoid of morals or kindness. We are an instinct  driven apex predator that survived in an uncaring  

world, only now we have coal plants,  nuclear weapons and social media.

This would be hard to handle for any animal,  

so it makes sense that we continue to follow  the impulses so deeply ingrained in us. But  

this is only because we have not yet caught up  with the mind numbing gift we have been handed.

The real tragedy of humanity today is that  we are these amazingly powerful beings that  

have not awoken to their potential. We are  trapped in the present and the mindset of a  

scarce world. But aside from the physical  limits of the universe there is nothing  

stopping us from creating a literal paradise  for ourselves. This seems so daft, but it is  

true. If we dare to tell ourselves a different  story about who we are and who we could be.

Humans throughout history felt like  they would witness the apocalypse and  

this feels especially true today, but you are  probably not living in the end times. There is  

a solid chance that humanity will persist  for thousands, maybe millions of years.

If this might be the very start of our history,  

what can we dream of achieving? Just like our  very first ancestors six million years ago,  

we may be the ancestors of another 250,000  generations of people. But while the hominins  

found themselves powerless in a world they  had to adapt to, our starting conditions  

could not be more different. It’s like we got  handed a save file of a game where others put  

in millions of hours of work – and where we can  decide what game we want to play in the future.

The world is still horrible. And it  is also the best world that has ever  

existed. And we can make it so much better.

An optimistic person living in the year 1924  would not believe the progress we have made  

in just a century. How much we reduced  poverty, how many diseases we cured,  

how much free time we have, what kind of luxuries  are ordinary to us, what technological wonders  

we take for granted, how few of us die  in war, how many live in a democracy.

And today we might very well be gearing up for  a jump like our ancestors 10,000 years ago,  

when agriculture changed everything for  everybody. From AI possibly transforming  

the information age, to biotechnology enabling  us to manipulate the language of life itself,  

to new sustainable ways of  harvesting the energy we crave.

If we start thinking in decades and centuries,  it is perfectly reasonable that we will solve  

our problems. We can eliminate poverty, maybe all  material needs. Defeat all diseases, maybe even  

death itself. We have the potential to restore  balance to the climate and heal the planet again.  

We may be able to adapt to the information  age and make lasting peace. None of this is  

guaranteed and it will be hard and full of  failure and setbacks. Some things will get  

worse before they get better. We will run  up against our nature over and over again.

But if we manage to clean up our act  we could create a world better than we  

dare hope for. You get to do that. You get  to live in a world that is deeply flawed  

but also the best it ever was. And you  get the opportunity to make it better.

A world with the smallest amount of  suffering possible, that fits our nature and  

inspires us to be the best version of ourselves.