It's ok to just do what you like...

...no need to carry the responsibility of having to save the world.

By doing what we enjoy, assuming no harm was done, we are already doing good for the world.

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[Disclaimer]

I'm not writing this to discourage you from "saving the world". Please do if you can, we need more of you, and thank you for all your work. I also think we all are saving/changing the world by being ourselves already.

I'm writing this hoping to not make it a pressure to "save the world" because it is so abstract and such a socially constructed idea that usually comes externally. It's perfectly ok if you just live your life, figure out your passion, do good for the community when you can, and give back when you can. No need to stretch yourself so thin to save the world. We gotta save ourselves first.

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This thought came up before and has come up again when I listened to a podcast "How to Be a better human" episode - "How free solo climber Alex Honnold faces fear".

I'm usually interested in listening to things about fear because I'm interested in learning how to manage it, so I don't let fear stop me from pursuing something that could be good for me.

A bit of a background about the guest Alex Honnold - He is an American rock climber best known for his free solo climb on big walls, including the El Cap in Yosemite National Park. El Cap/Capitan is a vertical rock formation in the national park with an elevation of about 2,308 m.

(Check out how very vertical El Cap is in the image below - source)

In this episode of the podcast, the host (Adam Grant for this episode) asked: "If you succeed, there is a decent chance that people who never would have tried El Cap before are gonna die climbing it", then Alex politely disagreed and stated his point that it will keep away people who want to do it for the wrong reason instead. Alex also mentioned that during the press tour for one of his latest documentaries called "Free Solo", he chatted with his audience and learned that his movie didn't inspire others to climb the El Cap; most audiences were inspired to do the things they have wanted to do personally.

I like how Alex responded to Adam's question: "What is the purpose of being the first wall climber? How is that contributing to the world?". I thought this question was a bit of a guilt trip, but maybe Adam was just curious.

Alex responded that: "What is the purpose of doing anything anyway. Sometimes, you just gotta do the things you enjoy doing and take it from there." He also mentioned that he sees this as his contribution to pushing human progress/potential, even though it might not necessarily improve any global conditions.

Another point that I'm interested in learning to do myself was when Alex mentioned that what helps him go for the scary climbs is that he knows how to separate whether the fear is useful or not. Fear is always there, but if it has a really small possibility of it actually happening, then we don't need to give fear too much weight in the decision-making.

He also encouraged the listeners to "Just try" because there are usually low consequences for failure and added that most things in life don't have high consequences in failure anyway. Is it even failure if you learn from it? - was one of the good questions he asked.