Over the past week and a half it seems I've gone from Harari to refreshing myself on the status of the worlds global climate catastrophe to learning about all sorts of cool stuff Bret Victor has worked on and continues to work on. I also bounce regularly back into thinking about what I'm doing with my life because right now it certainly doesn't seem that I'm doing much at all. Yes I go to work for a company that gives out loans (boo, loans) to finance travel (yeah, travel), but that's not particularly engaging nor beneficial in my estimation. (I would in fact claim that, even if we are giving people opportunity that they would otherwise have forgone do to the alogorithmic nature of how those people operate, the company I work for is a net negative in terms of producing value through lending - the money's not going to research or implementation of effeciency gains glimpsed through research - and a net drain on the individuals since they end up paying more financially, and any opportunity benefit experienced from that cost is unlikely to return to them financially in the long run (though I recognize it is possible in all cases and therefore bound to happen occasionally).

Anyway, I sit here now, lost in thought because even after 30 years, well, maybe more like 15 to 20 of legitimate contemplation regarding the future of the universe, I could still use some additional clarity about what it is I'm doing here. I remember starting with 'how to make decisions', 'prioritizing the decisions to make', 'answering the big questions that were easy' and then eventually 'deciding to devote my career to the 'biggest problem(s) I could find'. Unfortunately, it's turned out to be quite hard settling on a single problem, and I've consequently milled about several without legitimately tackelling any of them: climate change, population control, digital democracy, etc. Less and less frequenly, but still more often than I'd care to admit, I waste other time thinking about my personal life... I diverge. So, given that I don't particularly feel like writing at the moment and I'm almost at 10 minutes, I aduie with this stream of conscious idea: how do I create tools to gather data about what humans want to evolve into?