The founder of the messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov:
We live in an era when the possibilities for human creativity are endless. One can invent robots, edit genes, design virtual worlds… There are so many exciting unknown areas to explore. I hope that more people will discover the enjoyment of building things for others. I hope that one day we, as a species, will turn away from the self-destructive path of never-ending consumption to a fulfilling journey of creating a better world for ourselves and those around us.
I think he is mixing two messages up. Most of his post is about the ills of the unsustainable, mindless consumption of food and goods typical of the Western world. Somewhere in the post is a mention of his realisation that “the most rewarding kind of occupation is creating things, not consuming them” which led him to create the Telegram project. He seems to have combined both of these messages to make a value judgement about consumption and creation in general.
I have a different, more positive take on this.
We have spoken often about consumption in the context of content, for instance the mindless scrolling through social media. While it’s important to be mindful of and reduce that sort of consumption, it’s also important to create outlets for self-expression other than like and retweet/share that are built into social media. Your own blog. Or newsletter. Or topic-specific Twitter account. Or a public Notion page to which you keep adding. Or a YouTube channel. The possibilities are endless today.
Then as you consume vigorously, indulging multiple interests and spanning different mediums – music, podcasts, writing, streaming video, chat groups – you express to the world the best of them, and your thinking about them.
I came to this realisation late, but I have taken this to heart.
- I have this blog, on which I write about ideas loosely connected to five mega trends and five big questions. The site also has a running list of books that I’m reading.
- A friend and I are building PZChuck, a Notion site and (upcoming) a community for Indian coffee lovers. PZChuck also has an Instagram handle
- My own Instagram handle is an outlet for my gardening and plant rescue interests
- A blog for Indian film songs I like but which weren’t chart-toppers. The plan is to build this into a searchable database
- A blog to catalog funny signs I have seen during my travels around India
- Both low-effort and light-hearted: a Twitter handle around South Asian culture and one to comment on US politics
Taken together, these projects don’t cover all of my interests, and don’t even begin to approach the Telegram founder Pavel’s references to building robots and editing genes. Instead they are a set of fun, lightweight outlets for me to express idle and structured thoughts and reactions as I read, watch and listen to things I discover and like.