Undoing means Progress

“Growing up, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told me were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be, they weren’t natural at all.” ― Aaron Swartz

Stuff that’s useful and scalable always won. We've been discarding obsolete things and coming up with useful and more superior ones. But, scalable and economically viable stuff always came with tradeoffs. Choosing oil & gas over wind & solar is an example.

There are impressive projects that are literally undoing the damage by turning carbon from tires into graphite. Alternative energy sources on the other hand, may not undo the damage that's already done but considering the projections, finding alternatives can be as significant as undoing.

Coming up with solutions that won’t create new problems is the new normal. It can be hard. But healthy ideas are easier compared to undoing the mistakes. Building healthy things after all just ducks the net negative impact.

We have to deliberately keep pushing ourselves into a find-realize cycle. Individually or globally, we can start with finding mistakes if we have enough humility to realize that we are prone to making mistakes too.

A way to undo is usually laughed at and expensive. It’s easier to pick a quarrel over small things as much as picking oil over solar. Fortunately, we have access to more capital and humble people now. A way to push more alternative solutions seems to be between economies of scale and increased per capita.