You End Up Creating the World You Believe It Already Is

Or, sorry a bear ate you, but that’s just how the world works these days

If you talk to some marketing guy, social media guy, or god forbid, some influencer guy about how to start a YouTube channel, an Instagram account, a newsletter, a Twitter account, or even a WhatsApp channel, the standard advice you’re gonna get would be to treat your audience as a two-year-old kid with severe ADHD — one who doesn’t have even an iota of attention and who keeps on jumping from one toy to another without a second thought.

This kid doesn’t have the patience to read or watch anything. And it has a disdain that is reserved for you particularly. It couldn’t care less for what you’ve created. So, naturally, your primary job is to make sure you pull this hypothetical kid by its collar (assuming it hasn’t already changed into a collarless shirt), then grab its tiny head and turn its face towards your work so that it has no other option but to “consume your content”.

You can’t literally do that of course — at least not with your hands. That’s why you have to do that with your content (gosh I hate this word). The hack is to make so much happen so fast that the kid is “hooked”. In other words, like the girl in the comicstrip says, “Just make sure to blow up things.”¹

Most creators believe this is exactly what they have to do. There’s just no alternative, and that’s why they structure their content (again that repulsive word) in a particular fashion — short, punchy, superficial, kind of mindless, something that doesn’t require any kind of contemplative immersion, and is heavily attention-grabbing. Kind of like a Michael Bay film.²

But that’s actually not the point I’m trying to make — we already know what all is currently wrong with content creation and social media and stuff. What I’m getting to is a much much deeper problem.

I’m extremely concerned by the fact that what we do is heavily, heavily influenced by how we believe the world functions. The problem is, no matter what you believe, you’d often be right. Precisely because the world is big and diverse and you’d find enough evidence and bubbles that support your belief.

For example, if you believe your audience is a kid with ADHD, you’d create your content that targets them, thereby attracting a bunch of hyperactive kids, thereby validating your belief. If you believe that there are people out there who are actually hungry for deep content (due to the sheer lack of it), people who are averse to the mindless shit that usually circles around everywhere on the internet, you’d most probably do things a little bit differently.

And that’s precisely the problem!

YouTube, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, TikTok… take any of them, they all believe that we are that kid with ADHD, and we have no patience for anything that requires even a little amount of contemplation. We only lust for the superficial. As a result, they treat us like that kid. And as a result, a lot of us kind of end up becoming exactly like that kid.

You not only cannot build a world you don’t believe is possible — if you don’t believe that people have patience, you won’t create anything that requires patience — you end up building the world you believe it already is as a side effect.

The credo of most Indian startups that are fashioned after Silicon Valley is: growth at any cost. “These are the rules of the game,” is a common term. If you aren’t growing, you’re slowing. If you aren’t working twelve hours a day, even on weekends, like those Chinese startups, you’d be left behind. This delusion starts small, but when a lot of people start to believe in it, it becomes a collective delusion, and eventually, reality.

When you believe that being honest is equivalent to being rude, you behave in a certain way. When you believe that your customers are fickle minded, you bombard them with random notifications so as to “engage” them. (I mean, if I’m not looking for a ride right now, do I really need a notification from Uber?) When you believe your users are just a bunch of data points, you sell their info. And when you do all of that and make a lot of money, others imitate you, and suddenly these malpractices based on unvalidated beliefs become best practices.

FOR REASONS I’VE NEVER UNDERSTOOD, PEOPLE LOVE TO BELIEVE THAT THE WORLD HAS GONE TO HELL

There are a lot of “beliefs” that I either don’t align with or I’m not super happy with, but there’s one thing in particular that I hate with all my heart: the prevailing sentiment that the past was better than the present. “The good ol’ days” were the real deal. People were nicer, things were simpler, life was easier. But everything is bad now!

This irks me! Makes me want to grab them by their collar and shake ‘em: How do you know this is true? Just by watching The Social Dilemma? Or, did you draw this conclusion from a random anecdote from your grandmother? Or, is it that you had a great childhood, full of fun and play, but adulting isn’t really working out for you? Is it really coming from some scientific study and thoughtful observation, or are you saying the past was better simply because you’ve got a shitty present?

These kinds of statements get on my nerves mostly because these kinds of beliefs, even though they don’t make any sense, do matter! If you really believe that we are living in a far worse time than the past, you are basically alleging a complete failure of human development. It’s nothing short of a generational catastrophe!

If you genuinely believe that people were nicer and kinder in the past and that morality is sort of on the decline, we’re basically living under a very, very dangerous state of affairs. Morality is the glue that holds a society together. If that glue degrades, the society falls apart. Would you say that’s the case now? Are we on the verge of completely falling apart?

If you’re convinced that is exactly what’s happening, I believe you should really, really do something about it right away. But if that isn’t the case, and you are crying “wolf!” just because you’re bored and clueless, or just because you had a bad day, don’t you think a better idea would be to simply zip your lips instead of believing and, more importantly, misspreading a whole new ideology?

I dunno why it’s so hard to believe that pretty much any awful thing you can think of — war, murder, torture, slavery, etc. — people seem to do less of it now than they used to before. The economy has only grown and grown in the last 100 years. The British empire, the French empire, the Spanish empire, the Ottoman empire, the Mughal empire, even the Third Reich and the Soviet Union — they don’t exist anymore. Most of their colonies are free and independent states now.

Okay, to be fair, people don’t generally think of these examples when they claim that things have worsened. They rarely say, “Murder is up,” or “Terrorism is more frequent,” or “There was no ISIS or evil Russia in the past.” No! They say things like, “People just don’t care for each other as much as they used to anymore,” and “People used to make time for one another, and now they don’t,” and “You can’t speak your mind anymore. People are easily offended these days.”

Well, I wish there was some way to measure that. If perhaps there was some sort of a thermometer that we could stick into a person or a fossil to figure out their moral temperature, we would have resolved this debate once and for all. But since we don’t have that luxury yet, the next best alternative I can think of is the volume of good that people do.

If you consider disaster relief efforts by Red Cross or UNICEF, if you look the activities and stories in online platforms of support, such as GoFundMe, if you look at the humanitarian aid efforts such as by Doctors Without Borders or Partners in Health, you’d get a better picture of the goodness in people’s heart.

This might be a bit hard to believe, but it’s far far easier to do good now than it ever used to be — that is, if you genuinely wish to do good. Last month, in February 2024, John and Hank Green’s Project for Awesome raised $3,530,889 (that’s a 3 with 6 digits after that, which makes ~it $3.5M) to decrease world suck. This would not have been possible if fast internet at a very low cost, YouTube, and the power of livestreaming didn’t exist — as it didn’t exist two decades back.

Now, I agree, looking at the volume of humanitarian activities to measure general human niceness is like estimating the number of model rockets by counting the number of space exploration missions. Maybe they go together, maybe they don’t. In any case, crying, “I feel like things are worse” still doesn’t cut it. It’s akin to the situation where a bear has escaped from the jungle and is now running amuck in the city, mauling civilians into pieces, and everyone’s like, “Well, bear attacks are inevitable these days. Gone are the good ol’ days when we could live peacefully.” It’s nothing but a cheap cop out.

JUST SHUT UP AND LET ME WATCH THE JUNGLE BOOK IN PEACE

Believe it or not, the past wasn’t as good as you remember — it’s just an illusion fuelled by nostalgia, romanticism, and bad human memory. The present isn’t as bad as you think — you probably think it’s bad since every ugly detail is still fresh in your memory, in HD resolution. The future would be far far better than you anticipate — probably because a better future runs contrary to intuition.

In 1865, Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell wrote a set of four equations that predicted that there are these electromagnetic waves floating around, and light’s riding on ‘em! Light too is nothing but an electromagnetic phenomenon. Fast forward two decades, in 1887, German physicist Heinrich Hertz was like, “Wouldn’t it be fun if I put Maxwell’s hypothesis to the test,” and boom, he actually found those waves. Then, a decade and (almost) half later, an electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi figured out a way to use radio waves (a specific type of electromagnetic waves) for communication across great distances based off of Maxwell and Hertz’s work. In 1901, he famously succeeded in sending the first transatlantic radio signal.

Now, here’s the interesting part: neither Maxwell nor Hertz were thinking, “Is there any purpose of all this? How on earth would these findings be of any use to anybody?” They were simply following their curiosity. But give it a century, and suddenly we’ve got radio, television, mobile phones, and what not — all thanks to their curiosity.

This is precisely how the future works. It’s a mutation of various things — hobbies, inventions, curiosities, discoveries, philosophies, etc. — coming together to create something that’s pure magic.

What makes the future distinctive isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today. And it’s almost impossible to be able to predict this by looking forward — especially by engaging in linear thinking.

Linear thinking works like this: cars need oil. Oil is a finite resource and it’s depleting. Soon, we’d run out of oil and eventually, we’d have to stop using cars, and we’d be in a far worse situation than now. We’d basically have to walk everywhere, or maybe bring back horse carts. But of course, that’s not how things work. Somewhere in there, some dude figures out that batteries are a good power source and cars don’t care if the power source is gasoline or lithium-ion battery, and suddenly we’ve got electric cars, and we don’t have to walk everywhere we go.

The future is not at all intuitive. Michael Faraday couldn’t have known how his 19th century electromagnetic generator could power the nightlife in pubs, bars, discos, and rave parties of the 21st century. Even Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb — a lot of whose work was based off of Faraday’s — couldn’t have predicted this in his wildest dreams.

Most individual ideas or individual actions may not seem so significant on their own, but when you mix them together, you can get magic. For example, if you take plastic, and glass, and metal, and modern electronics, and a relentless personality, and company with high design standards, you would get an iPhone. This math can only work backwards.

It’s hard to know what an idea, a side-project, or a philosophy would go on to influence, and what a person influenced by those would go on to create. But it’s not very hard to realise the importance of individual beliefs and actions, your individual beliefs and actions, even the tiniest of the tiniest of them. Because, knowingly or unknowingly, you are shaping the future of this generation, and the next, and the next.

If you believe morality has gone down, maybe do some small and random acts of kindness. If you believe people aren’t nice to each other anymore, try being nice and helpful yourself. If you believe there’s too much superficial content on YouTube, maybe stop watching them, and start watching those that are genuinely good. If you believe that big publications are taking over, start supporting a couple of smaller publications. If you believe local businesses are struggling, do make an effort to shop locally. If you believe education is lacking, maybe start a YouTube channel or something. (I love The Coding Train and Eddie Woo.) If you believe people are becoming increasingly isolated, make sure to reach out to your friends, family, and neighbours. If you believe that society is acting like a poopy-pantsed four-year-old who dropped its ice cream, maybe write a self-help book for societies, exactly like Tim Urban did.

Anything, literally anything would do, as long as you stop lamenting, “Gone are the days when bear attacks weren’t so common,” and just let us watch The Jungle Book in peace.

1. There was a time when I used to create YouTube videos. It was nothing fancy. I simply looked at the camera and said stuff. While I love the idea of creating videos, and have been meaning for a while to start doing it again, this undue pressure of “structuring my content” in the most attention-grabbing fashion is very very daunting. It’s the last thing I want to do. In fact, the very reason I want to do anything creative (be it writing or coding or videoing) is to explore my curiosity and, above all, have fun in the process. I do what I do for myself. I’m lucky to have this privilege and this is something I never want to give up. Everybody is invited to join my party of course, but at the end of the day, I’m hosting this party for myself.

2. Michael Bay is basically the MrBeast of Hollywood.