How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things. — Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
The world is an odd place these days. There are lots of things going on that are outside of our control. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, pandemics, housing crisis, and so one. Some people call it the policrisis. A compelling mental escape then is the belief in destiny: that things happen for a reason, and that is nothing that can be done about it. But is that true?
Especially since the pandemic many (young) people have been more insecure than ever. After all, we’ve been robbed of a good part of our youth. A time in life where we’d usually test boundaries, our own, that of the close circle around us, and of society at large. Almost half the adults below 25 experience ongoing feelings of depression and hopelessness, almost twice as much as U.S. adults over 25.
In the past, it was the young people who would drive societal change, not much to lose but much to gain — still having a whole life ahead of them.
These days, the picture has sometimes turned. At a recent protest in the UK, it was mostly old people being charged and arrested for associating with a supposed terrorist organisation in speaking out against the atrocities in Gaza. If branded a terrorist, young people might have much to lose, say not being able to find a job over potential criminal charges. With old people living longer lives, many of them, too, still have a whole life ahead of them upon retiring.
I’m writing this post out my own personal struggle these days to navigate what may be destiny and what may not. As a scientist, I have limited access to anything supernatural — like destiny decided by an almighty being. Instead, what I believe actually is true is what a good friend of mine recently reminded of: that an individual can have much more sway over the world around us than one might think.
This is because, in a world where most people think that there actions do not matter, it becomes disproportionately easy to actually drive change.
Finding concrete examples of successful individual action is a bit challenging. The reason for this is that there is a degree of survivor bias. It’s easy to point only at positive examples, while there surely are many examples where ambition wasn’t met with the anticipated outcomes. Yet, if we think of the influential leaders of the past century, for good or for bad, there are quite a few examples of individual who brought dramatic change. The most dramatic of them probably is Adolf Hitler. If it hadn’t been for him, it’s highly unlikely that the world would have gone down the road to World War Two and the mass murder of jews and Eastern Europeans. The story of Trump is a similar one, albeit with outcomes so-far that cannot be compared at all to the 1930s and 1940s.
Change does not always have to be at such a massive scale. It often is most humble, which is okay. For example, I managed to develop a privacy app, TrackerControl, that ended up being used by more than 200,000 people. That’s only a fraction of the world population but a non-negligible number of people who ended up learning more about their privacy in mobile apps. Similar, together with my friend Ulrik Lyngs, with the Reduce Digital Distraction project, we’re trying to put people in more control of their digital device use — which many of us struggle with these days.
These examples show single persons can drive significant change. It also highlights that the outcomes of that may be vastly negative. This, in my view, makes it incumbent on any of us to speak out against what is wrong, and to try our very best not to give of an inch towards moral degradation.
So then, go out, do what’s right, and maybe change the world.