[marginalia_nu]

I think it's a problem outside of the VC-adjacent space too.

There's a sense that if you can't solve a huge societal problem (ideally several), it's not worth doing anything. It's really disempowering mindset because most of those problems are really hard to solve.

It's like all the focus is on what effect the thing you're building will have on the world, rather than just building something because you think it would be kinda neat if it existed.

The latter type of projects are the only sorts of projects I've had any success with. It's really liberating to not have to play some five dimensional chess game guessing what will make other people behave in certain ways and just using your own judgement to build what you like.

[gen220]

> It's really liberating to not have to play some five dimensional chess game guessing what will make other people behave in certain ways and just using your own judgement to build what you like.

I think people underrate this idea, way too much.

Humans are a pretty diverse set of people. But we're similar enough that in a population with ~10^13 people, there's probably 10^4 people who are pretty much clones of you, in terms of your preference, taste, etc.

With the internet, it's never been cheaper to find them. Preconditioned on it being you or me, 10^3 of those people are probably browsing this website, for example.

I hope the fluctuations of fashion lean more towards assigning social value to smaller, more sustainable builders. The migration in that direction deserves to be bigger. I observe it happening personally, but tech media is lagging significantly behind, mainly because these people don't spend money on advertising or PR.

[badtension]

Oh man well said, I had this uneasy feeling while reading your comment.

I think the world is fucked, especially in how it's planting incentives in our brains. For girls it's clothes, make-up, being fit. For guys it's cars, games, sex. And of course there's general consumerism that doesn't gender-discriminate anyone.

For tech people there's something else I hate with passion: creating images of great, world changing people. We aspire to be Zucks, Musks, Gateses, Holmes (yes, theranos). It's always bullshit to sell something or gain political power but the damage is done anyway. It's hard to live a simple life and enjoy simple things when everyone around expected you to look up to them and change the world. Many people believed their narration and became sociopaths that maximize gains on every opportunity. Even I was very drawn to "growth hacking" before. Now I see how crazy it all is.