Creating a list of open questions

Paradoxes welcome

I'm really trying to live a sense of my agency. "You can just do things." Something that scares me about my own agency is making a mistake, doing things wrong, or doing things dangerously. What if I create more harm than good? What do I do with my own cognitive dissonance? For instance, what if I spend 5 years building some fusion startup and all the while I cope/seethe away my concerns about the environmental fallout of the industrial processes that support a fusion breakthrough? It would lead to deep misalignment within myself, and would then impact what I release into the world. The problem here isn't the environmental fallout, or the fusion startup. It's that I'm afraid to face the dissonance between the two. I think there are no easy answers. What's needed here are open, fearless questions - naming them and bringing them to the surface, to document the conflicts and paradoxes that arise between values.

Here are the open questions that animate me today:

How much human suffering is caused by finite resources? Lack of water, or energy, or space?

How much of human suffering can be ameliorated by deeper consciousness and healing in the world?

Which is a quicker path to resolution of this suffering?

How are we to be, by ourselves and with others?

What potential is there to see more in the non-human world? Can we live and think and be in harmony with the non-human? What role might technology play in bringing us closer to the non-human world?

What can we learn from other lifeforms to create a richer sense of what computing is and could be?

Is it possible for us to reform human systems to foster deeper harmony with each other? Build these systems to be wiser? What is the best way to do so? The fastest?

Can I be "me" for a living?

I've created a home for these at parthagrawal.com/questions. I'll update them there.

What are your animating questions? DM them to me. Or, maybe we can chat about it over some handwritten letters.