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== I know what I should do now == Have you read the news? The planet is dying, and the inequality between the richest and everyone else (aka "poor") is evergrowing. Apparently, it's "old news". Everyone I know is desensitized to yet another nail in the coffin of the human civilization. Some are depressed about it, the majority are stuck in a happy delusion of "let's do things a little bit better, and everything will turn out okay". Flash news: it won't. = Here's why: When I "fell asleep" in 2005, one of my favorite songs was a ballad called "six billion people". When I opened my eyes again, there were 8 billion of us on this planet. When I learned about this number, I got scared. If you aren't, you should be. In my high school years I learned about "carrying capacity of an ecosystem". Ecological system allows only for a slight variation in its parameters; if one of the system's populations grows beyond a certain threshold, ripples will follow across all the other populations, resulting in the system's collapse in the worst case scenario. Let's say, humans are lucky, inventive, whatever you call it. Let's say we find a way to survive and keep our numbers through this natural disaster. What then? We live on a planet with limited resources. Unless a miracle happens, we will run out of them eventually. And if you check the numbers - available deposits of minerals and the extraction rates - you will know that we will run out of everything that keeps our greedy Western world going much, much faster than most of us are happy to admit. = Yeah, we're doomed, so what? A friend of mine asked me exactly this question. "So what? It's not like we can do anything to change the way things are." Except we can. The answer has been known for decades, and the answer was "sustainability". There's a catch, of course. As things stand, we're likely beyond the point of where we can just stop growing, keeping things the way they are, and call it a day. If you factor in massive inequality between the Global North and the Global South, you could start to see that the Western way of living has long overstepped the boundary of what is sensible. And here you have it. The only way to reach the point of sustainability is to scale our appetites down. To practice "degrowth", as it is called today. = Ah, it looks like you've been reading "Degrowth&Strategy"? Spot on. It's a tough book to go through, very academic, but it made me think about what I can do to help the cause. Something that can reduce the social inequality, something that can change some of the aspects of how we all live... I have some experience with computers, and a burning passion for education, for sharing knowledge. I want to make something that could give more power to disenfranchised groups of people. I want to make something that could help us all to live smaller and to see how it can be more satisfying. ...and I think I know what I should do.