Everything Around You Was Someone's Passion Project

Look around. Really look. That keyboard you’re typing on, the chair you’re sitting in, the room you’re in, the building you’re in, the bakery at the end of your street that sells that amazing bread, your freedom to walk down the street without fear of being arrested, the ability to read and write, the ability to communicate with people on the other side of the planet. I can go on forever.

We’re surrounded by other people’s devotion and hard work.

That’s not hyporbole. It’s fact. Everything you see around you was someone’s passion project. Before the mass production, before the focus groups, before the value engineering. There was just someone who coudn’t let go of an idea. Someone who looked at the impossible problem and said “I can solve this”.

And they did.

But here’s what’s bothering me in Europe right now: We’ve become excellent at pointing out problems. Master critiques. Professional complainers about everything from government inefficiency to technological stagnation.

We write lengthy threads about what’s wrong.
We share detailed analyses of system failures.
We craft elegant critiques of institutional problems.

And then we wait.

Wait for someone else to fix it. Wait for solutions to come from above. Wait for the system to somehow reform itself. This isn’t analysis. It’s learned helplessness.

We’ve been conditioned by decades of imperial power structures to think that change comes from outside. That our role is to merely identify problems, complain a lot, and then wait for someone else to fix them. Actual implementation is someone else’s job.

Everything around us was built by people ignored such compaints. They didn’t write treatises about why things are broken. They didn’t wait for perfect conditions. They didn’t expect someone else to solve their problems. We didn’t wait for America to innovate for us. We didn’t wait for China to manufacture for us.

The first democracy wasn’t built by people waiting for kings to give up power.

In the last three months, my country is the best example of how to break this cycle. We’ve been through a lot in the last couple of decades. We’ve seen our institutions fail us. We’ve seen our leaders betray us and divide us. We’ve seen our systems collapse. We’ve seen our people suffer. We’ve seen corruption, incompetence, and greed.

But we’ve also seen something else. In the last three months, we’ve seen students raise their voices. We’ve seen teachers, doctors, and engineers join them. We’ve seen people from all walks of life come together to change things. We’ve seen people who were told to wait for oposition parties to fix things, take matters into their own hands.

Here’s what Europe needs to learn from this: The right time to start building was 30 years ago. We fucked it up. The second best time is now.