Ask HN: What motivates you?

When I was in my teens, twenties and early thirties, I very seriously yearned for world domination. Probably because I grew up low-middle class and was always the small kid being picked on. I didn't work too hard at it because at my core, I'm a lazy person. Still, I put in enough effort to become the big fish in my various little ponds.

I only realised how insignificant I really was when several years ago, I stumbled upon Quora and the various 'How do I join Google' questions, and even more when discovered HN and what proper software development really is like.

HN has given me a huge imposter syndrome while at the same time given me the resources to really educate myself and learn more about making things flash on a monitor.

Nowadays, I do it simply because I enjoy it.

Whoa, chill out there, Skynet.

I think people actually enjoy purposeful suffering. That's even what many games bring about. A life without suffering is boring.

But we don't want unnecessary suffering. Like parasites. Or having to walk 5 km for a barrel of clean water.

Suffering in the aid of others, like bringing a barrel of clean water over 5 km for your family, is actuallu very satisfying though. More so than, say, getting 5 customers through a day of telemarketing.

Bringing some order to chaos.

The big audacious goal is minimizing global suffering. Yes, it can be a weight if you focus too much on "if I don't achieve this, people will be worse off", but you ultimately realize that thinking like this should only be done if it helps you toward the metric. If the burden is heavy, but it helps so many others much more than yourself, it's barely a burden compared to what so many beings go through.

I believe a person achieves this day to day by focusing on the goal, and then extrapolating backwards to what is going on each day, each month, that is working towards that goal. I believe a person can contribute by focusing on a couple important categories:

1. Economic: Accumulating wealth gives you tremendous leverage to affect change in a positive way. Informing people of issues and remedies. The ability to improve and affect infrastructure and policies to be more communal and social. Putting dollars behind improving global medicine and technology for good.

2. Inspiration and Information: Assisting grassroots movements to better the world, spreading factual information, creating new science, writing, big ideas, and art. Basically, what has good chances of improving the well being of people and animals without simply economic might.

In the end, you'll have moved the needle and can hopefully get many other people to move the needle forwards too. Society is approaching a point where we have the opportunity to finally make all livelihood well off, without the immense pain and destruction that has occurred in the past. It's because of the people in the past who pushed us forward, and the onus is on us today.