I tend to feel cheated out of my time when I come to the end of a post like this one, because it seems to focus on the wrong thing. Here's what my issue is:
"What do people want?" is a very broad and imprecise question, and on that level, it is very easy to answer. I've been alive for a little more than a quarter of a century, and I can easily tell you what I want.
1) I want it to be easier to maintain and improve my health.
2) I want my relationships - friendships, business partnerships, romances - to require less effort to maintain and grow.
3) I want it to be easier to acquire and retain new knowledge and learn new skills.
I am willing to bet that at their core, everyone has an approximation of at least those desires, and then some. However, the things that I've outlined are just the difficulties of "the human condition", if you will. Breaking down those problems into their more detailed subproblems is difficult, but it seems that solving those is infinitely more difficult, and pushes them off into the realm of science fiction. These are important, hard problems where a working technical solution would make the inventors orders of magnitude more money than solving some pain point that some company in some niche market has.
Yeah, I also felt that the poster was just bragging on and on like a boring talk at a bar counter... oh wait, it's my post!
Now I remember. It was within a long discussion with a guy who kept complaining nobody had respected his accomplishment and wanted to hire him. I wanted to tell him that he had to have feedback loop to align his and others' interest. (And to be honest, I was already irritated to the guy at this point.) That was the context.
I don't deny that there are important problems worth to tackle even nobody seems to care about them. But if you do so, you won't complain about nobody caring, will you?
Comments
I tend to feel cheated out of my time when I come to the end of a post like this one, because it seems to focus on the wrong thing. Here's what my issue is:
"What do people want?" is a very broad and imprecise question, and on that level, it is very easy to answer. I've been alive for a little more than a quarter of a century, and I can easily tell you what I want.
1) I want it to be easier to maintain and improve my health. 2) I want my relationships - friendships, business partnerships, romances - to require less effort to maintain and grow. 3) I want it to be easier to acquire and retain new knowledge and learn new skills.
I am willing to bet that at their core, everyone has an approximation of at least those desires, and then some. However, the things that I've outlined are just the difficulties of "the human condition", if you will. Breaking down those problems into their more detailed subproblems is difficult, but it seems that solving those is infinitely more difficult, and pushes them off into the realm of science fiction. These are important, hard problems where a working technical solution would make the inventors orders of magnitude more money than solving some pain point that some company in some niche market has.
Yeah, I also felt that the poster was just bragging on and on like a boring talk at a bar counter... oh wait, it's my post!
Now I remember. It was within a long discussion with a guy who kept complaining nobody had respected his accomplishment and wanted to hire him. I wanted to tell him that he had to have feedback loop to align his and others' interest. (And to be honest, I was already irritated to the guy at this point.) That was the context.
I don't deny that there are important problems worth to tackle even nobody seems to care about them. But if you do so, you won't complain about nobody caring, will you?
To address your #2, the fact that having a deep relationship is difficult is why such relationships are valuable and precious.