Keep your idealism

Before going to sleep, I was listening to an old Steve Jobs talk, which I knew as a recording from 1982, and heard an idea I really liked.

Why do young people create new things and try to change the world?

He described his first experiences with computers: writing a programme on punch cards, taking them to a computing centre and waiting for the result. To him, the arrival of personal computers was extraordinary progress.

But when he told someone who had grown up with computers, that person didn't understand what was so surprising.

This is the part that stayed with me.

For one generation, the computer is a revolution that changed their entire life. For the next, it is an ordinary thing that has always existed.

And, crucially, the next generation doesn't think it is perfect.

They don't dwell on how much worse everything used to be. They look at what exists now and ask: why does it work like this? Why can't it be better? Why should we put up with it?

I think that is one of the best things about being young.

We don't feel the same reverence for the achievements of the past because we don't remember the world without them.

For our parents, the internet was a revolution. For us, it has existed for almost as long as we can remember. We aren't astonished that we can reach someone on the other side of the planet in a second. Instead, we're annoyed when an app takes three extra seconds to load.

And that is wonderful!

That dissatisfaction is precisely what makes people create new things.

The same is happening with AI. Some people marvel at how far we've come in just a few years. Others already find today's models insufficiently intelligent and are trying to create something fundamentally better.

I don't think this is only about biological age, either.

Over time, people accumulate more reasons to accept the way things are. You remember how much effort it took to create what already exists. You understand the constraints. You know why something won't work.

Gradually, instead of asking “Why not?” you start asking “Why change anything?”

That is exactly what I don't want to lose as I grow older.

At the end of the thought, Jobs urged young people to preserve their idealism and the feeling that the world as it exists isn't yet good enough.

I completely agree.

You can respect what previous generations achieved and still believe that almost everything around you could be improved.

Perhaps the best way to honour people who once changed the world isn't to admire their creations forever. It is to try to make those creations obsolete.

Progress starts when someone looks at what everyone takes for granted and asks:

“Why did we decide this was the best possible version?”