The Immensity of the World’s Largest Problems
The Russian TRIZ theory of problem-solving describes the hardest problems as the ones where the only possible solutions involve trade-offs between things you really want. In the case of humanity, sacrificing some land so you can grow the food that you need (or at a more individual level, spending time with your friends vs. getting done the report due Friday). Yet, the theory also describes these problems as the most valuable ones, as they are the ones where innovative, new solutions are needed most to bypass this seemingly-inevitable sacrifice.
The most serious problems in the world today include poverty, climate change, and war amongst other catastrophes, but they’re always in the back of our minds as something someone else will fix. Despite their grave consequences for all of humanity, most people choose to ignore these issues in their daily lives. Primarily, this is because of the sheer scale of the problems and how it seems impossible to even start to make a difference. That being said, the human species (and all other species on Earth) NEED as many people to be working towards these problems as possible. This is why the focus of this article is to highlight the specific details and challenges of the most monumental issues on this planet. Buckle in, because this is just as important as it is hard to take in.
You can’t Comprehend a Million vs. a Billion
If there’s one thing that humans have always been bad at, it’s being able to understand truly massive scales: a million vs. a billion, a hill vs. Mount Everest, your value vs. Bill Gates’... For instance, try thinking about what some of the largest diseases today are. Immediately, you might think of something like cancer, with around 17 million diagnoses every year. This number is minuscule, however, in comparison to a disease like malaria, which infects around 500 million annually but receives less attention in the developed world.
This problem only gets worse if you try to look beyond the developed world for an issue like global poverty, which affects 3.5 billion people who live on less than $5.50 a day. 3.5. BILLION. That is almost half of all humans living a lifestyle which is completely unthinkable for the rest of us, yet most of us are not even aware of it (much less doing anything about it). This fundamental issue limits us in preventing these immense problems, as we cannot even understand which ones deserve our attention. It is only, however, an issue of focusing on the present; there are completely different challenges when we try to focus on the future.
It’s Hard to Acknowledge Problems with Long-term Impacts
Think back to the last time you were watching the news. Odds are, you saw a story on the impact of climate change, whether it be a debate on government policies or a scientist talking about the increasingly major impacts of natural disasters. This is just one example (although a very famous one) of many divisive issues whose impacts are spread out over a long time, instead of posing an immediate risk. Consider the controversies around vaccines, GMOs, internet privacy, etc.
While it may seem frustrating to see how much we argue about these issues at sometimes, we have to acknowledge their major presence and impact in the world. Right now, climate change or GMOs affect billions of people around the world. Yet, we cannot seem to agree on the importance of these issues from person to person. This stems from the inherent difficulty in envisioning the impacts of large issues, especially when they’re someone else’s.
We Don’t Relate to the Problems of Others
Try to think about the life of an ordinary person in a developing country like Nigeria. How might they cook? Or work? Or get an education? Odds are you have no idea what their day-to-day lives involve or the problems they face, like using telephone lines instead of wifi and ensuring their food is safe from insects. It’s a similar situation if you’re trying to envision the struggles of finding postsecondary career opportunities for rural populations or females in much of the world.
There are massive problems in the world, but they unequally impact humanity. In the developed world, the problems most people have are not remotely the same as the developing world (which is the majority). Yet, people in the developed world have a much higher potential to solve these issues and pursue opportunities. This fundamental paradox limits growth; the people who have the greatest ability to solve the world’s largest problems are the least likely to face any of them or understand any of them. After all, how motivated can you be to help someone on their test when you don’t even know the subject it’s on? Then, comes the fact that we’re all rigging the tests against us to make it even harder to finish.
There’s Opportunity in every Problem, but not Where you Think…
Does that sound like a self-help book without any basis? Of course, any problem brings the opportunity to solve it, but there’s an even greater opportunity in not fixing it. … What? Think about the global illegal drug trade. This market is estimated to have a size of $600 billion. The industry is literally larger than the economies of many countries, causing violence, corruption, and healthcare crises all around the world.
And maybe one day, some lucky politician will start new legislation that effectively deals with the problem in her or his country, taking advantage of the opportunity in finding the solution. In the meantime, however, there are literally countless masses benefiting from and fuelling the drug trade. From poor farmers who are able to secure a constant demand for their illicit crops to the average person getting their hands on substances that otherwise would not be possible, there are so many people benefiting from the status quo even as others suffer because of it.
This is the paradox of solving some of the biggest problems in the world; rich oil tycoons benefit from fossil fuels, growing factories benefit from cheap labour, and software companies benefit from exploiting personal data. Since these powerful forces are gaining opportunities from these massive problems, even at the expense of others, they will work to prevent change and slow down the progress of finding solutions. That being said, ordinary people are also to blame in not realising the impacts of small actions, all building up to a breaking point.
But I only Check Instagram for a few Minutes…
Have you ever been the one protesting that those tiny bad habits couldn’t possibly be as bad as the news makes it out to be? After all, how much harm could it do to take a quick Fortnite break, check your Instagram notifications, or get a disposable water bottle from the vending machine? As it turns out, our tiny, mindless behaviours have been congregating to make quite a big mess indeed.
For instance, consider the growing popularity of social media and gaming all around the world, not just in developed countries. It seems that every time you go on another ‘10-minute’ Youtube spree, all that’s trending is some kid who got rich playing Fortnite. Yet, no one realised how those 10-minute breaks slipped by, gradually getting longer and longer each time. Now, people spend 116 minutes on social media daily, with links to increasing rates of mental illnesses. Concurrently, we got new features and new filters, but no one stopped to think about what we’re giving up. Is our data really anonymous or private if any programmer worth her/his salt could easily identify someone by looking at just a few pieces of information?
Of course, if people really knew about the serious consequences of their behaviour, they would just change their actions, right? Then why do we continue, more than ever, to keep producing waste that is killing our environment, whether it be buying ‘pure’ water or staying on trend with the newest clothing? The consumerist culture is always so mindlessly obsessed with the new, it doesn’t even realise that the new is the old in orange with a 50% mark-up. Did you really gain $1000 of satisfaction from your latest phone’s camera that you didn’t have with your old $500 phone? Every single action we take has a consequence. Maybe, not now. Maybe, not large. But if our entire species keeps making thoughtless little mistakes, it makes an unthinkably large mess, especially as one problem uncontrollably leads to another.
The Problem with Connections is there are Bad Ones too…
It’s nice to have things fit in together and connect easily… except when those things are issues. Despite our best efforts, problems have a habit of coming around one after another from the same causes. For instance, consider how much influence something like money has on the way people live their lives; it affects their housing, food, health, security, and so much more. Thus, it would make sense that poverty, just one problem, would lead to other issues in many aspects of people’s lives. This holds true for more than a single individual, leading to major issues being correlated and driven by each other.
Consider just the problem of poor health quality and access to care due to poverty. This one part of the many negatives of poverty alone can lead to major world issues. Primarily, poor communities and countries can have higher rates of drug trafficking and addiction. As a result, more people (not necessarily in just those poor communities) are likely to develop drug addictions, affecting parts of their lives like their family and work. The conflicts created here, like losing a job, can lead to mental health issues, which put people at a higher risk of suicide. Evidently, just a single factor in a problem (poor health from poverty) can lead to many other issues in itself. Now, imagine all the issues that are connected with the other factors of poverty that we mentioned. Or all the issues from the other major problems we’ve talked about. Clearly, this is a complicated process with frustratingly numerous connections between world issues. And what makes it even worse is that the largest issues or the top-down problems influence nearly all aspects of our lives.
Real Change may Start at the Bottom, but it Ends with the Top
To fix any problem, someone needs to take action. That one proactive person starts a change from the bottom-up. For the biggest problems in the world, however, a solution needs to change the entire system from the top-down. Problems like government corruption, student debt, or a wealth gap are so huge, our fundamental values in society need to change to solve them. To truly accomplish these systemic changes, we need to address the core flaws with the most powerful parts of society: the governments, social norms, the economy, etc.
Consider problems like government corruption around the world. Even as I write this, Venezuela’s government is in turmoil. On a global scale, 80% of the world suspects its governments of some form of corruption. When was the last time you felt you could trust your politician to represent what is best for the common good? When was the last time you thought that the government was shaped by you instead of another lobbying group? The current incentives for politicians, institutions, or legislation make no sense for bodies that should be independent and only working for the people. How can a politician always represent her/his constituents while worrying about acquiring private funding for campaigns? How can any judicial system work properly when its main source of revenue is from bail? To address major issues like these, you have to change the system at its very core from the top-down.
The sad truth, however, is that the people suffering most from these systemic flaws are the most vulnerable at the bottom. The day-to-day workers trying to make ends meet with multiple jobs. The students, just in the U.S., that owe $1,500,000,000,000 and will never be able to pay back $600,000,000,000 of it. The people paying up to 600,000% mark-ups for some patented medication that they need to survive. These are the ones that suffer most from our broken system, yet the cruel reality is that they are also the ones who have the least control over it. What makes this reality even worse though, is that it may be entirely unnecessary.
We have MORE than enough Food for Everyone
How easy is it to find food today? You don’t have to hunt a boar or plant some wheat. Everything comes pre-packaged in bite-sized pieces at your nearest supermarket and all you have to do is go pick it up. Better yet, why not go to one of the hundreds of thousands of fast food restaurants that make hundreds of billions of dollars each year, all around the world? In both the developed and developing world, it is easy to see the adverse impact that fast food has on public health. For instance, western fast food has been spreading to China, causing an evident growth in obesity rates by replacing traditional cuisine. In fact, three times as many people die around the world annually from obesity than from malnutrition.
That being said, there is also an immense issue in getting people the food they need. Every year, 815 million people are undernourished, even though we have 1.5 times the food we need to feed everyone. What…?! We have more than enough food for everyone, but 800 MILLION don’t have access to it! While people are dying from eating too much, others are starving because they can’t find enough to eat. Obviously, the problem theoretically shouldn’t be occurring, but our inability to balance our resources sustains it. This is a common theme amongst many of our largest problems. The main issue is not that we are incapable to solve the problems, it is that we are not able to effectively address resources to these issues. Of course, there finally is the barrier that we cannot envision our future problems. We are awful at predicting what the future might look like and, thus, are awful at making it look like a future we want.
The only Constant in Change is that People Resist it
Imagine you’re one of the successful ice magnates in the 1880’s, profiting from harvesting ice from frozen lakes in the north and selling it around the world in the summer. Business is booming as ever, with even the poorest people of the New World purchasing ice in major cities like New York. You could never have predicted that in just a few decades, your enormous business would completely be unearthed by the first mass-produced refrigerators. In your bubble of success, you had no idea about the enormous changes to come in the industry. This is our constant predicament in time. From the present, we seem ever so far from the rudimentary past, but we never can predict the exponential growth to come.
Now more than ever, it seems, that there are new technologies emerging every single day. Someone finds yet another use of AI or someone finds yet another cure, but these new discoveries cause new problems at the same time. Think about how it was just a dream that we could understand the human genome and how humans worked at the biological level. It seemed so promising to be able to use this information to cure major genetic diseases. Yet, now that the technology is growing, we are discovering all the ethical implications it brings. And genomics is just one of the major exponential technologies today. Imagine all the hidden potential waiting to be unlocked with the sciences of the future. But be sure to take a step back and realise that this is unlocking Pandora’s box, with both positive and negative consequences that we cannot even imagine, let alone plan for.
Key Takeaways
- Harder problem = more valuable solution
- Want to be a millionaire? Why not a billionaire? Because you don’t know the difference.
- To solve a problem, you need to understand it first. To want to solve a problem, you need to live through it first.
- There is rarely a problem people do not benefit from. And if they benefit from it, they will do their best things to keep the status quo.
- Little problems keep piling together to have large impacts and we’re really bad at noticing this growth.
- Large issues affect all parts of our lives and connect together to drive each other.
- Change is driven from the bottom, but its biggest impact occurs when it ends at the top. We need systemic change after individual change.
- We’re changing the world faster than ever right now. The problem is, we can’t ever envision future change or prepare for its impacts.
So that’s that. Just some of all the challenges with addressing these major world issues. It seems overwhelming, doesn’t it? How we could possibly get over all these hurdles as a species? What would be worse, however, would be to ignore all this. These major issues deserve major attention, because we simply cannot ignore the suffering of countless millions of lives. These vast challenges are waiting to be solved and I dive deeper into how best to approach them in this series on problem-solving.
