Human flourishing
The most important work one can do is work that protects and enables human flourishing.
Why?
As far as we know, there is only one planet in our universe with life. On this planet, our planet, there is only one species, our species, that has evolved consciousness. The process that allowed for consciousness to emerge happens in the human brain. And to this day, consciousness appears to be the most complex thing in the universe.
If we are to one day discover the meaning of life, we must preserve consciousness. Although much of popular science makes us believe that our technological, material, social prosperity is pre-destined, this is far from the case. Our last seventy years of progress and relative peace is anachronistic, and there remain serious existential threats we must overcome to achieve lasting prosperity. These include climate change, geopolitical threats, the threat of misaligned artificial intelligence, pandemics, decaying social fabric, and cosmic threats such as asteroids.
The question of whether something promotes human flourishing is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree.
If you're a supremely talented person with a track record of success, pursuing harder, more impactful ventures seems morally right. Luckily, there are many important challenges facing humanity that no one is working on, including critical, and even existential challenges. To the extent that one is in a privileged position of getting to choose that to work on, failure to pursue a morally positive and high-impact venture constitutes a loss for humanity. These are often the hardest types of ventures to pursue, but interestingly, some believe that they are in fact easier to pursue. After all, the best talent seek to work on these problems, and the ROI tends to be higher given the impact on humanity.
One simple way of thinking about this is a 2x2 axis with moral direction (x-axis) and magnitude of impact (y-axis). It looks something like this:
Moral direction (x-axis)
- Harmful = actively worsens human outcomes
- Trivial = neither helps nor harms meaningfully
- Noble = actively protects or promotes long-term human flourishing
Magnitude of impact (y-axis)
- % of population affected
To this end, two simple questions one can ask are:
- Does this protect humanity (from existential threats, war, etc.)?
- Does this expand human flourishing (health, intelligence, consciousness, standard of living)?
As of mid-2025, a list of problems which fit these criteria probably:
- Unlocking abundant, too-cheap to meter energy (unlocks manufacturing, unlocks vertical farming, unlocks cheaper Power-to-liquid (PtL) fuels (SAFs), to large-scale water desalination and direct-air carbon capture, unlocks AI)
- Reducing emissions in other sectors
- Creating abundant food supply
- Advancing space colonisation
- Solving housing affordability to protect the social contract of western societies
- Providing world-class and equal access to education to all children on the planet
- Solving low birthrates (and resulting household formation/marriage/social fabric problems)
- Creating more efficient resource allocation mechanisms for private markets
- Increasing industrial inputs and materials resilience; securing supply chains and national soveriegnty
- Mental health/trauma reduction
- Solving misinformation and disinformation (as a means of protecting our social fabric)
- Ensuring the efficient administration and allocation of resources by Nation-States
- De-bottlenecking natural resource discovery
- Securing critical minerals for the West
- Unlocking zero-carbon manufacturing and vertical farming
- Unlocking low-cost, minimal human labour, and efficient construction
- Reforming global research publishing to promote open access
- Creating more integrated care experiences for older adults
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