A loving roast
We poke fun — because we care.
We're about to gently roast the whole species — ourselves very much included. Not to be mean, and not at any one group. Just to laugh at how silly we can be, and maybe nudge us to do a little better. If you can't laugh at us, who can you laugh at?
Exhibit A through, well, all of us
We pour fortunes UP, almost nothing DOWN
We've mapped Mars in sharper detail than our own seafloor, and the deep ocean gets a rounding error. The greatest frontier is under our feet — we just keep looking the other way.
We are SO good at talking
All-time record levels of opinions, all-time low levels of doing. Everyone's a commentator; almost nobody's on the field. Somewhere a genius idea is dying in a group chat.
We waste like we've found everything
We treat the planet like a finished game with infinite resources — hoarding, tossing, scrolling. Meanwhile 80% of the ocean is unexplored. Imagine being bored on a planet we haven't even seen yet.
We fight over things we could just… discuss
Turns out an astonishing number of problems are solvable by two adults using words and choosing not to be weak about it. Revolutionary technology: the conversation.
Finance charges 2 & 20 — to lose to a guy who did nothing
An entire industry pays itself a fortune to underperform someone who bought, held, and went to the beach. If you're going to charge that much, at least win. Bold strategy.
We're animals in clothes, arguing about the clothes
Deeply impressive apes who invented the internet — and mostly use it to be mad on it. We contain multitudes. The multitudes are arguing.
We invented math — then used it to grade humans
The most powerful tool we ever built, and we point it at ranking teenagers by SAT scores and sorting people with models. Imagine using math to explore oceans and fix things instead of judging each other. Wild concept. (We're trying it.)
We named ourselves “wise man” — with a straight face
Homo sapiens literally means “wise human.” We picked that name ourselves — about the species that invented both the vaccine and the comment section. Bold self-review. Jury's still out, but we're rooting for us.
Why we roast
With love — and a point.
The joke's never really on "them." It's on all of us, a little — because the real problem was never some villain out there. It's that we forget how much we could do, and how much better we could be to each other.
Laughing at it is step one. Doing something is step two. So go appreciate the world, then go build something in it.