Ask HN: I'm 20, naive and want to save the world. How?
Right now I'm in a state of apathy regarding the current status of the world's health. I only see problems not solutions. What do you do to get the feeling of contributing to a better world?
Second - thus, your goal now is to maintain the achieved level of power and look for ways to enlarge it.
Keep in mind that many people don't really care about the good in the world, let alone saving it. Their perspective is a personal one, I'd say even a selfish one.
His central message: the key to changing or fixing the world is to understand and fix yourself, deeply and thoroughly.
It resonated with me as I've been on a similar quest to work out how to "save the world" since my early adulthood. It took me till a few years ago (15-20 years after I started trying to "save the world") to realise that this was what I really needed to do.
It's a hard journey but an incredibly important one, as it requires becoming fully honest with one's self and everyone else, and becoming humble and realistic about what is possible for one person to achieve.
But as Peterson says, once you do this, you'll notice your little corner of the world starting to change around you. You then realise that if enough people in the world did this, the major problems of the world would quickly sort themselves out, so the next step is to help and empower others to do the same thing - but only those who have chosen to do so (trying to help people who don't want to be helped is futile and destructive).
Another piece of advice: read (or read about) the classics - ancient philosophy (especially Seneca) and mythology, along with Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment philosophers like David Hume, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.
The most important thing to recognise is that at a fundamental level, the problems being faced by the world now are not altogether new, and for most of what we're struggling with now, people were struggling with different versions of the same things, hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Which is not to say we should despair and give up.
But we should understand the what's gone before us and what's deep inside of us before we start trying to prescribe solutions to today's global problems.
Pick one small problem and try and solve it, or improve it. Example: excessive CO₂ in the atmosphere. Possible solution: figure out how to plant fast-growing plants on a massive scale, ideally in deserts.
Do you believe your apathy is an obstacle to solving problems? Or have you simply not found a problem you care enough about? Or do you mean that you feel overwhelmed by the number and severity of problems you perceive in the world? Or are you actually discouraged by a perceived inability to see solutions to problems? These are all different concerns, and while it isn't clear to me which (if any) of these are yours, I will try to address all of them.
As objectionable as some may find this, apathy (in the sense of being unable to summon deep concern for problems not affecting you directly) is not necessarily an obstacle to solving problems, but it certainly can be an obstacle to solving them well. You can care a great deal about the solution to a problem while caring little for the effect it has on others, but the less isolated the problem (the more people affected), the less likely it is your solution will solve the problem for everyone, or solve it adequately. Indeed, it is entirely possible to make a problem much worse or create a multitude of new problems without taking great care to avoid such things. There is some question as to whether it's possible to change anything whatsoever without doing some kind of violence in the world, and I advise you seek to minimize the violence you inflict however you can. Still, if you're genuinely concerned about an overabundance of apathy, know that a dose of compassion can help, and compassion can be cultivated. (On the subject of doing harm without meaning to, consider Zizek's Violence.)
Whatever your level of worldly concern, you'll still need motivation. What problems move you will be unique to your character and experiences, but I promise you: if nothing is appealing to you, you will need start working first and wait for motivation later. This may be disquieting and counter to intuition, but just as smiling triggers mirror neurons that can lead us to feel happy, so too can working on a problem cause us to care about it. By this, I don't necessarily mean toiling away at a keyboard in isolation; I mean you need to be steeped in the problem. Convince yourself the problem you perceive actually exists by meeting the people who experience it, first hand. Confuse yourself by meeting the people who don't. Understand how others have attempted to solve the problem. Too often you'll find the problem you perceived at the beginning was not a problem at all, and the real problem, if one even exists, is something else entirely. This is important work--far more important than crafting a solution--because you are working to find the right problem to solve.
Once you begin to comprehend the true depth and complexity of a problem, you can easily be overwhelmed by the many sub-problems and their intricacies. Here you must decide what you can do that would have the greatest impact, form a hypothesis regarding how it can be done, and begin iterating toward a solution in small steps. There is an absurd amount of literature on dealing with the many facets of such an enterprise, and I won't try to enumerate all that I've seen here, but I will urge you to exercise humility and generosity in whatever decisions you make. I rather liked the methodology presented in The Lean Startup, though it probably could have been condensed to an essay.
Finally, if you simply can't think of solutions, I suggest doing three things: solve other, smaller, simpler problems; read more about things related to the problem; read more about things prima facie unrelated to the problem. As for specific tactics, Polya's How to Solve It is never a bad place to start. Anything by Michael Michalko is probably worth reading, as well.
Whatever you decide, I wish you well in your endeavors!