Transcription
I just spent the last month consuming way too much utopian and dystopian science fiction, but there's one specific story that I can't stop thinking about. This one episode of *The Orville*.
*The Orville* is a Star Trek-style sci-fi show that imagines humanity in the 25th century. But beneath its comedic exterior, it asks one of the most pertinent questions facing us today: What happens when technology eliminates scarcity?
"Hey, that's my sandwich!"
But why is this idea so relevant today? Well, there's this techno-optimistic philosophy that I've noticed has taken hold of tech bros on the West Coast, one that sees AI as the catalyst to reimagine the fundamental relationships between people, work, and resources. Changes as dramatic as the transition from feudalism to capitalism itself. The whole structure of society itself will be up for some degree of debate and reconfiguration. Silicon Valley and our tech overlords have big plans for our future, and the season 3 finale of *The Orville* really illustrates all that's at stake for us.
[Music]
Here, the episode centers around Lysella, who lives on a planet not too dissimilar from our Earth in the 21st century. Her planet has a lot of the same problems we do: poverty, endless wars, lies politicians tell to keep people in fear. Everyone's scared and paranoid because nobody trusts each other. But Lysella, despite living a very comfortable middle-class life, has dreams of escape. You see, in a previous episode, *The Orville* accidentally revealed its existence and origin to her. She is the only one on her planet who knows that there is a union of planets out there that live a much better version of life than anything available to her or her people. After *The Orville* left the first time, Lysella was changed forever. Like a virus, she couldn't shake the memory of life aboard *The Orville*. It infected her thoughts. All of the problems of her planet feel worse now because she knows there is a better way.
"Captain M, receiving a message from Sargus 4, from the researchers."
"I thought we were supposed to contact them."
"We were."
Lysella finally reaches out to *The Orville* on a stolen communication device and tells them that she can't stand to live there anymore. "I won't go back," she wants out. "Please, she's ready to walk away." Lysella views *The Orville*'s world as a utopia. With their advanced technology, they seem to have transcended most of the problems that plague her world: no poverty, no wars, no resource scarcity. It's everything she thought impossible.
But fully grasping what this means for us requires looking at Lysella's story through multiple philosophical lenses, because Silicon Valley is asking us to consider a similar transformation. "I still expect that there will be some change required to the social contract, given how powerful we expect this technology to be." It's telling that Sam reaches for the phrase "social contract" here. The last time humanity played with this concept was when Rousseau was imagining how society could transition from feudalism to capitalism centuries ago. We are being asked to imagine the restructuring of capitalism into some sort of techno-utopia, and the first step to realizing any change, especially one as dramatic as this, is to imagine it.
So, before we get into the rest of Lysella's story and see what life is actually like in their utopia, let's play a little game. What does utopia look like to you? Is it a city with towering skyscrapers seamlessly interweaving nature and technology? Or does it have the vibe of a small village with little cottages everywhere, technology fading into the background as people live in a collaborative community? How and where do people work in this place? Or do people work at all? Maybe robots fulfill all of our needs here, and people are free to pursue their passions and interests. After all, there is abundant clean water and air, efficient public transit, and never a shortage of avocados, or whatever it is that you most care about.
Now, you may balk and think that the people that live in a place like this must be soulless automatons, lacking any individuality or knowledge of suffering or purpose. But no, these people actually have complex inner lives, experiencing emotions like joy, love, passion, freedom, and pride for all that they have built together. Nobody is homeless or starves, and there are no drugs. Or, if this place is starting to sound too goody-goody, maybe there are lots of drugs, plentiful mind-expanding drugs. And let's throw an orgy in there too, if if that's your kind of thing. The point is, if you can imagine it, this utopia has it. This shining city on a hill, this city of [Music] Omelas. You can imagine it, can't you? You can accept that a place like this could exist.
Before you answer that question, let me tell you about one more thing. You see, in one of these beautiful public buildings, far below the magnificent skylines, down below street level, there's a hole. And at the end of this deep and dark hole, there is a room no bigger than a broom closet. In one corner of the room are a couple of mops, and in the other is a child. It could be a boy or a girl. It it doesn't really matter. And actually, it may not even be a child. It might be closer to an adolescent, just so malnourished and underdeveloped that it looks like a child. It knows that nobody will ever come, except for sometimes. The child child doesn't really have any understanding of time or interval, but it knows that sometimes one or many people appear. One of them may come in to kick the child to make it stand up, but most usually just look from afar with frightened, disgusted eyes. The water bowl and food dish are hastily filled. The doors are locked, and the eyes disappear. The food, if it can be called that, is nothing like the food that the people of Omelas eat. No, like most of the child's life, it's painful and just enough to keep it alive. The child hunches in the corner, away from the two mops. It's afraid of them. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still there, always there, standing, watching.
Now, you might be thinking, what monster could do this? And in a utopia like Omelas, how could anyone allow this to happen? Well, when people of Omelas reach a certain age, whether that's age 8 or 12 or 25, when they are at an age where they can understand, they go to see the child. And no matter how much explanation each one gets ahead of time, these young people are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They all know it's there. All the people of Omelas. And remember, these people are not soulless automatons devoid of feeling. They are sophisticated enough to understand and appreciate the health of their own children and the beauty of their city. When they view the horror of that child in that hole, they understand exactly what it is they are looking at. They feel disgust, anger, outrage, impotence – emotions they had thought themselves superior or to. They would like to do something for the child, but they know that their city, all of their perfect trains and roads, all of their good food, clean air and water, the health of their children, all of their happiness and prosperity depends upon the suffering and abandonment of this one load-bearing child. And the rules are strict. If they bring the child up into the sunlight, if they try to clean it or feed it or comfort it, even in so much as utter a single kind word, all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange the happiness of thousands of people for the chance of happiness of one. That would be to let guilt into the walls of [Music] Omelas.
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a short story written by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1973. When she wrote this philosophical thought experiment, the space age was in full swing. The first mobile phone call was made that year, and personal computers were on the horizon. It was an era defined by boundless technological optimism, even as questions about inequality and the human costs of progress were becoming impossible to ignore. "The Ones Who Walk Away" doesn't shy away from these tough questions because, at the end of the story, we learn something else about Omelas. We learn that after the young people come of age and travel down to see that child in that closet, buried deep in that hole in that unassuming building, most just go on with their lives. They may go home in tears or a tearless rage, but after brooding over it, most people, confronted with this terrible paradox, begin to realize that it's bad, but really, it's the lesser of two evils. Even if the child could be released, it wouldn't get much good out of that freedom. Maybe a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, but little more. It's too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long to ever be free of fear. It wouldn't know how to respond to love or any type of humane [Music] treatment.
And it's from this place that the young people of Omelas find acceptance. Acceptance of the terrible justice of reality. They accept that they, like the child, are not free. Every day they wake up and participate in the machinery of their prosperity. They build the buildings, teach the children, bake the bread. They create art, fall in love, have families. They maintain the very infrastructure that depends on that child's suffering. And in doing so, they become both the prison and the prisoners. The system shapes them, even as they shape it. They understand with a clarity that burns that they cannot separate themselves from the system that sustains them, that every moment of joy in Omelas draws its power from that deep, dark basement.
So now, do you believe that a place like Omelas could exist? Does learning of the child and the terrible bargain that people have made make the utopia they built more credible? Well, let me tell you something else that you may find incredible. There are some people, when they come of age, who cannot accept this bargain. Some who, upon seeing the child, walk away from Omelas. These people, unable to accept the truth that their society is built upon, leave in silence. They walk out of the city's gates, ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. Le Guin writes, "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist, but they seem to know where they are going." The Ones Who Walk Away from [Music] Omelas.
So what do you think? The central metaphor is in the story of Omelas. Is it about the moral cost of progress? The idea that our grand democratic societies are built upon a history of exploitation? Or is the central idea that in order to break out of the system that has us all trapped, we may need to just walk away? Let me know what you think in the comments. But for me, this story resonates because it reveals something deep about the human psyche: the fact that we're unable or unwilling to accept the idea of a utopia unless there's this hidden pain and suffering that comes along with it. As Le Guin writes, "We have a bad habit, encouraged by pance and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting."
And it's at this juncture that we find Lysella choosing to walk away from all that she knows into a world of abundance. Welcome to the galaxy. *The Orville* grants her asylum from her old world. Commander Kelly is assigned to help Lysella acclimate to a new way of living, one that is very different from where she comes from. Kelly begins by showing Lysella the technology that changed everything for them: the matter synthesizer.
"Glass of water."
The matter synthesizer is a technology that can create anything out of thin air: food, clothes, tools. "One shot of Slint cure, just a little programming." The machine will build it for you, atom by atom. It was the single most transformative moment in our history. When all your material needs are provided for at no cost, it changes the entire game. These matter synthesizers are ubiquitous in the show. "One Twinkie, everybody has them." And it's transformed the scale of their society into abundance.
And as a metaphor, the matter synthesizer perfectly captures our current moment in history. Silicon Valley's techno-utopian vision, at its heart, offers what the matter synthesizer represents. When AI automates large portions of our economy while simultaneously accelerating our scientific progress by decades, abundance becomes more than science fiction. For the first time, we're facing the very real possibility of a world beyond scarcity. And that's exactly the problem. Scarcity isn't just a condition of our economy; it's the load-bearing myth that the entire system is built upon. Just like Omelas needs its suffering child, capitalism needs its foundational belief that there isn't enough to go around. Abundance is capitalism's natural enemy. Capitalism doesn't just need scarcity; it actively creates it. The system rewards players who manufacture scarcity for the sake of perpetuating itself.
Take what AI labs like OpenAI have done. They took the abundance of information available on the internet, the data that all of us humans have created collectively, and built their language models from that. After benefiting from all of that free and open information, they then restricted access to their models, choosing not to share the model weights, effectively moving from an open-source model to a closed-source model. They manufactured an artificial information scarcity, and the system has rewarded them immensely for it. And we see this pattern everywhere in our economy. Take something that should be a shared resource, turn it into a commodity, and then control who gets access. We see it when companies bottle and sell our water back to us, when pharmaceutical companies jack up insulin prices, when corporations lock away the once-open internet behind paywalls. Each time, they take something abundant and make it scarce.
And this applies to human labor as well. Most of us trade the one resource we all have, our time, in order to acquire the money for the basic necessities of life. I mean, it's just so basic. You have a job, you survive. You don't, you starve. And this scene reveals the heart of the thought experiment *The Orville* is asking us to consider here. In our world, work isn't just about creating value or contributing to society; it's it's about survival. We've built our entire social structure around the idea that you must work to deserve to live. For many people, this desperate chase for money becomes their entire purpose. Prove you're worthy enough to exist.
And despite all the fantastical technology she has now [Music] seen, this aspect, the idea that nobody has to work, is the hardest one for Lysella to internalize.
"So then, why don't you guys just lay around all day, do nothing?"
"It's no fun. See, on your planet, currency is money. In the Union, it's reputation. So if you do something, anything that benefits our society and you work hard at it, you're rich. And that could be anything. Maybe you want to study a field of research, learn all you can about history, physics, literature, or art, just for your own pleasure. The only life considered poor is one that's wasted on."
But as Lysella learns more about the matter synthesizer, her wonder turns to guilt. "You know, just this could change the world back on my planet. Even just one of these synthesizer things." She begins to regret her choice to walk away as she starts thinking about everyone she left behind. "Why couldn't you help them? Why couldn't you share your technology? I mean, there are whole countries that barely have clean water. This could save millions of lives."
"It's not that simple. But *The Orville* has this non-interventionist policy. We're not allowed to drop advanced technology into a developing society, like, like playing God." So they deny her plea. But Lysella's response isn't anger at *The Orville*; instead, she turns that guilt inward. "I can't do this. It doesn't feel right. I feel selfish. Why? I escaped and I left everyone I know back there to suffer. I mean, why do I deserve this? What did I do to be made the exception?" This reaction reveals just how deeply the ideals of her world have shaped her psyche. Even when offered abundance freely, she can't help but question whether she's worthy of it. The system she was a part of for so long has convinced her that she needs to earn her right to exist.
"Some people would call what you're feeling a form of survivor's guilt."
"I just... I need to go back."
There's more to Lysella's story, but to better understand her choices here, we need to first acknowledge the elephant in the room: intertextuality. This is the idea that no story, no piece of art or literary work exists in isolation. Rather, each one exists in this complex network of references, influences, and connections to others that shape all of their collective meanings together. And in that regard, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is pretty promiscuous in its intertextuality.
In 2018, N.K. Jemisin wrote a rebuttal to Le Guin's work that asks the question: What if we didn't walk away? What about the ones who stay and fight? Imagine the great city of Umot. Its skyscrapers float in the sky, and the children wear clothes made of butterfly wings, all from butterflies that died of natural causes, of course. Because Umot, by all measures, is a fair and just city. A utopia, like Omelas seems to be, but without that wretched child in the hole. You see, the people of Umot are not naive. They understand that their perfect city was built upon the foundation of a dark history. The city had a very different civilization once, one that might be much more recognizable to you or me. And just like Omelas, when children of Umot come of age, they learn that their city is also built upon suffering – that of the past. But when they find cruelty or suffering in their society, unlike Omelas, they don't walk away. They understand that the ideals of their city are fragile and must be protected.
Through a quirk of quantum mechanics, Umot exists parallel to our world, and its citizens can peek into our reality. They can watch our TV, browse our social media, listen to our radio. But this creates a dangerous problem: an information hazard. Because when Umot citizens witness our world, where some people are considered less important than others, where artificial scarcity is manufactured for profit, where suffering is normalized, these toxic ideas can infect their thinking like a virus. These beliefs spread and threaten everything they've built. Enter the social workers. These Sentinels stand guard against this contagion. They understand that maintaining their utopia requires constant vigilance against the very ideas that nearly destroyed their civilization in the past. So when they find someone who's been exposed to these toxic ideas, they kill them to protect their utopia. [Music]
And here's the dark irony of Umot. While they've eliminated the child in the basement, they've created a different kind of suffering. Their social workers become the white blood cells of society, forever tasting the bitterness of violence so that others may know only sweetness, carrying darkness within so that others may live in light. Are these societies really all that different? While Omelas keeps a child locked in a basement, Umot requires its guardians to bury their own inner child in a psychological hole. The methods are different, but the core idea remains the same: if we suppress enough, whether it's a child's freedom or dangerous ideas, we can have a perfect society.
And this smars the great lie at the heart of our own society's evolution. We tell ourselves that we've progressed from feudalism to capitalism, that we've freed ourselves from the old system of lords and peasants. But have we really? Or have we just replaced one form of hierarchy with another, one form of measuring a human's worth with another? Capitalism is a development by refinement from feudalism, just as feudalism is a development by refinement from slavery. Capitalism is but the gentleman's method of slavery. The lords of our time don't live in castles anymore; they launch themselves into space in penis-shaped rockets. The serfs don't work the land; they wear Amazon wristbands that track their bathroom breaks. The divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of billionaires who claim they alone can guide humanity to its technological future. In this emerging techno-feudalistic landscape, these digital aristocrats aren't just hoarding wealth; they are hoarding data and computing power, effectively reshaping how we think, connect, and understand our world. In this iteration of the social contract, they are hoarding the future itself.
And it's with this context in mind that we can return to Lysella's story. Because her world is not that different from ours. And when *The Orville* decides that Lysella can go back home if she desires, they stipulate that she cannot take any of their technology with her. She will have to return home as she came.
"Thank you again for everything. Take care of yourself."
But when she boards the shuttle to take her [Music] home...
"Lysella, what can I have a look in your bag?"
"Why?"
"I think you know why."
She gets caught trying to smuggle blueprints for the matter synthesizer.
"Kelly, please open the bag."
"Lysella, I can convince them. I know we can do it, right? I'll make sure they don't take advantage."
"Whether you can or you can't, I'm not authorized to let you try."
And it's at this point that the thesis of *The Orville*'s thought experiment is made bare, as Kelly reveals a truth about technology that haunts our own world.
"Come with me. I want to show you something."
There's this insidious idea that's been with us since the dawn of the first Industrial Revolution: this idea that technology can save us. If we build the right tools, develop the right systems, create enough abundance, everything else will fall into place. This is the third planet in the Gendal system, about 600 light-years from your world. This is how their world looked early in the 23rd [Music] century. This is Gendal 3, 35 years later.
"What happened?"
"We [Music] did."
In 1923, the researchers who discovered how to mass-produce insulin sold the patent for just $1. Their belief was simple: this life-saving medicine should be available to everyone. It was a moment of ethical clarity, perfectly aligned with technological breakthrough. To today, a vial of insulin costs just a few dollars to produce. The technology has only gotten better, more efficient, and more automated. We can make more insulin than ever before, and yet, in the United States, people are rationing this same insulin. Some die because they can't afford it. The technology exists, the production capacity exists, but people suffer anyway.
In Kelly's world, this same sentiment had the same outcome. She explains to Lysella that the early Union explorers thought they could help Gendal 3. When they got to Gendal 3, they found a divided world, bristling with nuclear weapons, continents sliced up by national borders. So they landed, they revealed themselves, their technology, everything. They figured it was the right thing to do, that maybe they could help this planet skip over the nasty growing pains that all worlds seem to have to go through. But they couldn't control the spread. Nation-states fought each other, wars broke out everywhere because they all wanted to use the advancements for personal gain and for political dominance. They wiped themselves out in five years. Nine billion people gone.
We live in an era of unprecedented technological capability, but we've built it all on top of a system that's still fundamentally based on artificial scarcity, on the idea that suffering is not just inevitable but necessary. There's a deeper philosophical question here about the nature of suffering itself. Eastern philosophers, particularly Buddhists, have long recognized that life inherently contains both light and shadow, joy and pain, abundance and limitation. These natural dualities help us grow and learn, like a plant needs both sun and rain to thrive. But what we've created in our society is something different. We've built systems that manufacture unnecessary suffering, artificial dualities that serve no purpose except to preserve hierarchies.
The tech oligarchs of our time exemplify this perversion. They speak of building a utopian future. "Uh, I think technology does a great deal to lift the world to more abundance, to greater heights, to better prosperity, whatever, whatever you want to call it. Um, and I'm optimistic for that. I don't think that'll require any special intervention." And at the same time, they take the collective knowledge of humanity, our data, our creativity, our shared cultural output, and lock it behind proprietary AI models. They promise abundance while manufacturing new forms of scarcity.
This is why all of these stories resonate so strongly today. We're we're not just building technology; we're building power structures. And without a corresponding evolution in our ethics, in our in our values, in our fundamental ideas about human worth and dignity, we risk creating our own version of Omelas or Umot: a technological paradise built on hidden suffering.
"You can still go back if you want to, but you can't pull them into the future. They have to do it on their own." [Music]
So, is there any hope for us? Us who have lived in a dark hole for so long? Can we find our way to the light? Is a post-scarcity utopia possible for us? Well, before we find out how Lysella's story ends, we need to engage with one more idea. Let's imagine that the child in the hole of Omelas is rescued and taken aboard a spaceship. On this ship, the child finds a Star Trek-style Federation that has mastered interstellar travel and eliminated most forms of human suffering. This advanced civilization sees it as their duty to fly across the galaxy, freeing all of the children trapped in all of the holes. To us, and to the rescued child, this Federation seems like a true utopia. But suddenly, the Federation ship is attacked by another, more advanced civilization that demands they hand over the child. They claim the Federation is barely civilized, condemning them for being addicted to hierarchy and tribalism, torturing innocent plants for food when they could easily subsist on artificial food. Just as the Federation rescued the child from one type of horror, the more advanced civilization claims to be rescuing the child from another.
In "The Odyssey Problem," a 2022 reply to "The Ones Who Walk Away," Chris Willrich reveals the central insight hidden in the story's title: the Odyssey. You see, we like to think of utopia as a destination, some perfect society we can reach if we just make the right choices. Walk away or stay? Fight or flee? Reform or revolt? But that's that's not how it works. Every society, every person, is on their own Odyssey towards something better. The Federation looks like a utopia to us, but to the more advanced civilization, they're still primitive. And who knows, maybe there's an even more advanced civilization out there that looks at both of them and shakes its head at their barbarism. The point isn't to reach some perfect end state. The point is to be on the journey, to be constantly striving, learning, growing, healing, to be making things better, step by step, day by day. It's it's like climbing a mountain. We struggle upward, thinking we can see the summit ahead, but when we finally reach that peak, what do we find? More mountain stretching out before us, peaks we couldn't see from below. Each summit we reach reveals new heights to climb.
The 20th-century German philosopher Ernst Bloch understood this deeply. In his "Principle of Hope," published in 1954, he articulated utopia as existing in the "not yet." He saw utopia not as some far-off perfect future, but as a process woven into the fabric of reality itself. For Bloch, hope wasn't just wishful thinking; it was a way of seeing the world's unfinished nature, of recognizing that every moment contains within it the seeds of what could be. He was adamant that "if we are able to look at our past with the eyes to see, we may find new potentialities in our present. The past has a cultural inheritance which has yet to be fully exhausted." And if we take a moment to reflect, we might realize that we are much higher and further along on the mountain than we originally thought. We live in what would seem like a utopia to someone from 200 years ago. If you're fortunate enough to be watching this video right now, you have access to things that even the wealthiest and most powerful people throughout history could never have imagined. You carry around a device equivalent to the sum of all human knowledge in your pocket. You have machines that can peer inside your body to find and alleviate disease. We take these things for granted, but they're miraculous. They're utopian. And in these everyday miracles, we catch glimpses of even greater possibilities. What Bloch called anticipatory illuminations of what could be, like discovering a new route up the mountain.
These moments of possibility often emerge from unexpected places. "Nvidia shares falling again today as the AI trade looks for some new equilibrium." Following the release of DeepSeek in January of 2025, while Western tech companies were building walls around their AI advances, guarding their routes to the summit, a Chinese company called DeepSeek chose a different path. Really? This is a takeaway in the AI arms race. There are before and after moments. DeepSeek created one, not unlike OpenAI's ChatGPT moment a few years ago, a breakthrough so significant it redraws the battle lines. They released their R1 model, a free and open-source reasoning model that rivals the performance of the flagship proprietary models from the giant US labs. But they didn't just find a new route up the mountain; they shared their map with everyone. Not only did they figure out how to train and operate their model for a fraction of what US-based labs are spending, but they publicly released all of their research and training methods. They broke the artificial scarcity at two levels at once: they made the knowledge free, and they made the technology cheaper. The irony here is a company from China, a country often criticized for blocking paths in their closed system, chose to build public trails where American companies had been setting up toll booths. DeepSeek created abundance where American companies had manufactured scarcity. All of this sent the US AI industry scrambling.
But this is what hope looks like in practice: not perfect, not clean, messy and unexpected. It's people choosing to break down artificial barriers, choosing abundance over scarcity, choosing to share rather than control. These are glimpses of a possible future trying to break through into our present, like discovering a previously hidden trail through the mist. They show us what Bloch called the "not yet conscious," the dawning awareness of what we could become. And this is exactly the idea that Lysella learns to internalize. She realizes that in the end, we all have to find our own way to climb out of the hole.
"The technology doesn't come to save us. Look at this place. It's a utopia. If we had all this, we could be better people."
"It doesn't quite work like that. You got to flip it. You get all this by becoming better. Trust me. Your planet is not ready for a Quantum Core based on what you told me. They'll probably blow each other to bits. But once they learn to work together, to really live with each other, and develop a genuine investment in each other's growth, that's when it gets good."
The technology isn't what makes a utopia. The matter synthesizer isn't isn't what makes *The Orville*'s future better than ours. Their willingness to share, to break the cycles of scarcity, to invest in each other's growth – that's what makes the matter synthesizer possible in the first place. Lysella eventually decides to stay aboard *The Orville*.
"Yeah, it's it's going to be a big learning curve, but I got the right coach."
She finally understands that true abundance comes from learning how to climb. [Music]
Thank you for watching until the end. It means the world to me. And a special thanks to my channel members who make all of this possible. These videos take hundreds of hours to produce, and I wouldn't be able to do it without your support. But if all you can do is leave a like, that makes a huge difference in this message reaching more people. Thank you.
And finally, that brings us to today's sponsor: Anthropic. Anthropic makes language models like Claude, but they also, um, they, they focus on safety. Sometimes, is is that enough? Okay, you're good. Okay. This video isn't isn't really sponsored by Anthropic. That that'd be pretty wild, huh? Um, no, I just, I just wanted everyone to leave so that it's just us now. And if you're still here watching, then this question is for you: What would the world look like if you truly believed it could change?
When we see all the suffering around us, it's it's natural to want to rush in and help, to dream of being the hero who finds the solution, who fixes the system. [Music] But that mindset keeps us stuck in old patterns. The truth that that took me too long to learn is that we aren't here to save the world. The world doesn't need to be saved; it it needs to change. It needs to evolve.
Listen, I I notice like to think differently, to feel so alone, never really fitting in anywhere, to look around at the world and see things that others don't see, to know there's a better way. But for every moment where you felt isolated, where you felt the burden of the world on your shoulders, there have been others. People you've never met, that have come before you, and people that will come after you. People who have carried the same questions, the the same fire, that that same unstoppable hope. You are not separate from them. You are part of a living web of dreamers, of change makers. Some of them are sitting alone in rooms just like this, wondering if they are the only ones who feel this way. And the time is coming where we will find each other. And when we do, we will realize that the burden we've been carrying, that private, familiar burden, was never just ours. It has been shared all along, across time and space, by people who dare to dream that something better is possible. That fire you carry is the continuation of a dream that has echoed across eons. It's ready. It just needs you to make the choice to begin. [Music]