What Are We All Working Towards?

It's easy to be dismissive of this big question as philosophical to the point of being meaningless. Or we can reframe the question as asking about ourselves specifically. But I see this big question as being supremely practical. If we as individuals have goals, have things we want to achieve in our lives, and organizations have things they want to achieve as part of their existence, and throughout history, even states have had clear objectives, why wouldn't we ask what our global society, our species, is working toward?

If you accept this big question for what it is, there seems to be a huge lack of a clear answer. I find this strange given how much we and our ancestors have achieved, especially strange knowing how compelling goals have mobilized huge numbers of people throughout our history to accomplish amazing feats. Horribly sadly, some of those resulted in incredibly evil acts, like the American concept of Manifest Destiny or campaigns of total war waged by the Khanate Mongols and Nazi Germany, but it's difficult to deny their results, even if they may have been fleeting and steeped in blood. However, there are also amazing acts of good that have come from compelling narratives of what our world could be. We eradicated smallpox. We established international governing bodies with the intent of worldwide cooperation and minimizing conflict. On a smaller scale, United States' determination to land a human on the moon resulted in one of the greatest scientific and engineering achievements known to our species.

These are just a few examples of what having a common goal can do for us. We can achieve the unthinkable if we unite under a single objective.

This big question is an infinitely practical to me, as since I was a teenager, I struggled to answer this question for myself. It seems that our society incentivizes people and organizations to just do more of whatever they're doing. It doesn't matter much if what you're doing has a positive impact on our society or our planet. We're most rewarded by finding a way to increase the scale of whatever it is that we're doing. This is why both people and organizations cling to their current existence. They've found a way to succeed and ardently resist any effort to remove them from it.

You could argue that we don't have an answer to this big question because of human nature. That there's no point in answering a question like the one, a question that asks what should every human be working on together to achieve, because of our nature.

I received a lot of mixed messages about human nature growing up. It seems there are different narratives around human nature being inherently good or evil. The reality is that absolutes rarely exist. Human nature exists on a spectrum and is filled with nuance. What pushes us to one end of the spectrum or the other is our environments. We're shaped in some ways by our genetic code, but our past experiences are by far the primary driver of our behavior (imagine a clone of Hitler raised by a loving Jewish family in New York). If we know this, then we can simply shape our environment to allow ourselves to become the wonderful beings that we all want to become and are lying within us.

Creating such an environment is by no means an easy task. It will be the work of multiple generations, and intergenerational projects are something that we are notoriously bad at. This is why having an answer to the question, "What are we working towards?" is so important, because if we somehow manage to obtain an understanding of a shared answer to that question during our lifetimes, it is imperative that that question be answered similarly by all succeeding generations to come.

I don't expect the answer to remain exactly the same; that would be ignoring the overwhelming wisdom of our species which teaches us that change is inevitable. But we have to start somewhere, and without any vision of what this environment could look like, without any vision of what a wonderful world could be, how can we rally together to tackle this enormous task? Without feeling the inspiration that our ancestors felt when they undertook similar mammoth challenges, we won't have a chance. This is why, as we take concrete steps down the path of crafting this world, we must also create a vision of what we want the future to be.

This vision must be grounded in reality, informed by all we know about science, and motivated by love. We must dare to dream more precisely than any of our ancestors have ever dreamed. If we do not, if we accept some vague notion of a better future, we will go stumbling blindly into the darkness, moving from one point to the next, at times progressing and other times walking back in the direction that we came from, possibly getting stuck for centuries along the way. Developing this shared vision that inspires all humans is of paramount importance.

I have so much faith in humanity because I know we're capable of incredible acts of kindness, compassion, self-sacrifice, altruism, and foresight. I know that if we simply create the right environment for ourselves and our children and all of our descendants to exist in, our most amazing qualities will shine through. We will create a wonderfully loving, compassionate, understanding, and intelligent species.

Let's start dreaming this wonderful world together.