Underrated ways to change the world - by Adam Mastroianni

A lot of people would like to make the world better, but they don’t know how. This is a great tragedy. It’s tragic not only for the people who need help, but also for the people who can help, because good intentions start to rot if you don’t act them out. Well-meaning people who remain idle end up sick in the heart and the head, and they often develop exquisite ideologies to excuse their inaction—they start to believe that witnessing problems is as good as solving them, or that it’s impossible to make things better and therefore foolish to try, or that every sorrow in the world is someone else’s fault and therefore someone else’s responsibility. We get stuck here because we assume that there are only two paths to improving the world. Option #1 is to go high-status: get rich so you can blast problems with your billions of bucks, or get into office so you can ban all the bad things and mandate all the good things. Only a fortunate few are powerful enough to do anything, of course, so mos

A lot of people would like to make the world better, but they don’t know how. This is a great tragedy. It’s tragic not only for the people who need help, but also for the people who can help, because good intentions start to rot if you don’t act them out. Well-meaning people who remain idle end up sick in the heart and the head, and they often develop exquisite ideologies to excuse their inaction—they start to believe that witnessing problems is as good as solving them, or that it’s impossible to make things better and therefore foolish to try, or that every sorrow in the world is someone else