Selection

There are various ways in which humans have established themselves to be the superior species on Earth. We can build comfortable homes for ourselves, procure, consume and improve nutrition to sustain ourselves, learn from our mistakes and make our respective futures better than our pasts.

However, there is another important aspect of human existence that helps us not only improve our lives, but creates room for future developments. Today, let’s take a look at this very interesting facet of life.

“You’ve got to pick your battles, Pen, but then fight to the death for the ones that matter.”

Tiffany Schmidt, Hold Me Like a Breath

An important facet of ours is that human beings are great at problem solving. We have a constant knack for not just finding accurate solutions to any hurdles and obstacles we have in our daily and larger pursuits, but also to find problems that we aren’t necessarily aware of.

Let’s take travelling as an example. For people who are from my generation (God, I sound old), unless it is for business (personal or otherwise), travel is a leisure or recreational activity that we indulge in every now and then to break free from the monotony of our daily routines. The travel duration varies depending on a lot of factors, but according to a recent survey, 13 days in a year is what Americans consider to be “just the right amount of time off”.

According to a website, it would take someone 51 hours (more than 2 days) to fly across the circumference of the earth. Now, sitting in a plane for 51 hours straight can hardly be considered travel. I mean a person who is travelling for leisure would like to go around and take a look at sites, monuments and people fighting in the street (No? Just me? Okay.)

So, for normal people, it takes around three months to complete a world tour, states a leading travel website. Three months equates to 90 days, which is almost 7 times the duration an average American said was “just the right amount of time”.

Mind you, these three months do not comprise of an exhaustive tour, but of the places a general tourist might want to visit. I think it might take way, way longer than three months to visit each and every place on earth.

The reason I am highlighting this is, there are (for me at least), enough locations on Earth to cover during my short stint here, and I think a reasonable enough percentage of you might agree with this as well.

Despite that, there is an interesting development in the aviation and travel industry, which is called “Space Tourism”. According to the first definition I could find on the internet “Space tourism is a niche segment of the aviation industry that seeks to give tourists the ability to become astronauts and experience space travel for recreational, leisure, or business purposes”.

All of these purposes are the ones which we discussed earlier that can be fulfilled with travel on Earth itself. And yet, the space tourism industry was valued at USD 598 million in 2021. The expected compounded annual growth rate (fondly called CAGR) is 37.1% from 2022 to 2030. This is an exorbitant amount of money for an industry, which satisfies a use case which was already satisfied for a very large percentage of human beings.

This is a true demonstration of the fact the we, as humans, have come to a point where the availability of resources has allowed us to not just solve the core problems that we face in our daily lives, but we can go over an above those problems. The “must-have” is no longer enough. The “good-to-have” and “great-to-have” have now become “need-to-haves”.

Now, how can we use this in our daily lives? Simple extrapolation.

In our lives, there are various so-called “problems” that constantly grab our attention. These problems could of any nature; financial, social, familial, the likes. All these kinds of problems have the tendency and potential to constantly capture our awareness and attention, drawing the resources that we have at our individual disposal.

But there need to be some clear selection criteria as to which problems are worth solving and which ones aren’t. If not for selection, at least some prioritization criteria to pick and choose which problems have the highest value addition if solved and which ones are just going to improve something that is already working fine.

There are numerous benefits to it, but off the top of my head, conserving resources (which we are assuming to be enough while deploying in our so called need-to-haves), more peace of mind and a clearer thought process seem to be big enough to at least reconsider anything we are going to act upon.

This time, my daunting question is one that I would recommend anyone to ask themselves before they are endeavoring to solve any problem in their life.

Does your problem really need solving?

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂