Nomad Day #257
I opened Substack this morning looking for something to read and restack. Instead I found Kylie Jenner’s $50 million bra, ICE agents surrounding a man carrying two children, a tearful Zelensky, and Google ripping up 250,000 trees in Finland to build a new data centre.
And for the first time in my 54 years on this planet, I felt genuinely scared for humanity.
I don’t mean the ‘Terminator’s-coming end of world’ kind of fear. What scares me is how much control sits in so few hands, and I’m not at all confident those hands have humanities best interests at heart.
Think about it. We have, at our fingertips, incredible technology that could, over the coming decades, help wipe out disease, eradicate poverty, ease loneliness and create more opportunities for more people than ever before.
We’re sitting on a goldmine of potential good!
But it’s controlled by a small handful of people far more interested in profit.
We have astonishing, ridiculously concentrated wealth sitting right alongside parents who can’t feed their children, and somehow we’ve all got used to that crazy contrast. Me included.
I’m still jet-lagged and slept badly, which won’t have helped. But the fear was real, and it brought me to tears.
Then I turned the light on myself.
I write about building businesses on beaches for goodness sake, while there’s so much pain & suffering in the world. Should I be tackling more important topics?
For years I’ve had my own philanthropic goals. I’ve dreamt about starting a VC fund for women in developing countries, and I’d love to build a not-for-profit store where I buy a mountain village’s entire stock of handmade goods as I travel, then sell it on at cost.
But they keep getting put off until I have a bit more money behind me.
This morning I started to think what a smaller start might look like, because I’ve been talking about them for years and done nothing.
In the meantime, I know what I want my writing to do. I want people in their 50s, 60s & beyond to stay excited about what they can still create. I want to shine a light on the places, people and cultures I meet along the way. And I’m building This Big World because I want to make people smile, the way Kikki.K’s journals have made me smile and dream bigger for years.
And when I’m standing in front of something natural & beautiful as I’m traveling, I’m reminded how much there is to love about this world. On mornings like this, that feels more important than ever.
I don’t know what the answer is, and I’ve reached no conclusions, but I’m taking one thought into my day.
If each of us cared a little more about the person sitting next to us, that would be 8 billion people caring about 8 billion people.
Simplistic, I know. But it’s a start.
Be the reason someone smiles today. 😁