It’s become apparent to me that most people struggle to think on a species scale. This makes sense of course: it’s deeply challenging in our large and complex modern societies to consider the breadth of our species. Humanity, especially modern humanity, has evolved an incredibly complex way of operating, explained by thousands of evolutionary relics and social mechanisms. One could even argue that humans have evolved to understand small context windows due to our tribal ancestors.
Nevertheless, it seems vastly important for a civilization to have individuals that understand, think, and act on a broader scope than their local elements. Individuals that consider broader masses of agents and their experience of life. An interesting phenomenon when considering broader scopes of the human civilization is the emergence of simplicity in the sum of complexity (also known as the law of large numbers). The individual’s unpredictability is substituted by the fundamental elements that define our modern lives. Electricity. Movement. Thought. Etc…
Zooming out to this species scale, modern societies seem very fickle. We spend the majority of our agency on broadly meaningless pursuits. In fact, most people never act in a deeply meaningful way to humanity at all, stuck in their individual local minima. Most work is trivial, in the sense that many other people could’ve done it had they chosen to, and that it didn’t make a meaningful contribution to our species’ understanding of itself or its environment. When seeing life as the opportunity for a complex collection of cells to act, for a finite time horizon, on a big rock, most of what we do doesn’t deeply matter.
This is why I believe it’s crucial that all agents in this experience of life chase non-triviality. One should aim to take on ventures that can significantly change our species’ way of organizing itself via the development of more elegant solutions to human life. In other words, do difficult work, that takes thought and taste, at the benefit of many people’s human experience. Do meaningful things.