Our society is stagnating. And that’s the real problem, we, as a human species, have. In the economy, there’s no real innovation and no real productivity anymore.
Let me give you some examples, why this might be the case.
Getting Rich, Without Working
25-year-old guys are collecting JPEGs of pixelated monkeys and invest in crypto Ponzi schemes in a hope to become rich without having to work for it, instead of creating value in the real world by working or starting a business.
Politics over Science
23-year-old activists are studying liberal arts and go out in masses to the streets to demonstrate against climate change, instead of getting a science degree and spending 10,000 hours of their life trying to invent an actual solution for the problem they see.
Research for Status Points
30-year-old brilliant people become economists to formulate overly complicated but aimless macroeconomic theories, get published in a prestigious scientific journal and collect citations, instead of actually helping their communities on a microeconomic level with entrepreneurship.
Talk is Cheap
36-year-old venture capital investors who never started a company themselves talk cheaply on Twitter and on conferences about innovation and how to create the future, instead of actually doing it themselves.
Marketing Economy
47-year-old CEOs choose the easy path by doing what has already been done before. Either by copying and slightly adapting what others have already built. Or by building a product based on an OEM, ODM, or White Label supplier, without adding meaningful value. The economy is sustained by marketing, instead of innovation. The same product or solution gets built and marketed over and over again. Instead of innovating and creating an entire new product category.
The Easy Path
I could go on and on, but the pattern is the same. We collectively pick the easy path. We feed our ego whether it is with followers on social media, fancy law and finance degrees, citations in scientific journals, or getting rich quick with JPEGs of monkeys or questionable M&A deals which add no value to the society.
In your deathbed, you’ll never say:
- “I wish I had bought more NFTs”
- “I wish I postulated more economic theories”
- “I wish I did one more LBO”
- “I wish I had created more TikTok videos”
- “I wish I had more scientific citations”
- “I wish I brought one more OEM product to the market”
Curiosity
What is missing is curiosity:
Curiosity for what we – as a human species – could be.
Curiosity for what the world could be.
Curiosity for what we as a person could be.
Now: Stop playing status games. Stop listening to your ego. Become curious about who your absolute authentic self is. What are YOU curious about?
We as a society need to become less ego focused and more curiosity focused. Let’s actually be creative and start inventing. As Peter Thiel puts it, let’s go “From Zero to One”.
By going from Zero to One, we will not only solve climate change or the current inflation crisis, but we will become a growing and prosperous society again.