unique contribution

(this note expresses a tendency that I notice in myself. I don't necessarily endorse this tendency but I think it's interesting to interrogate it.)

I want to do things that will only happen if I do them. I want to bring something unique to the world.

Being a cog in a big machine is unappealing, even if it's an important cog. If I didn't exist, the machine would just replace me with another instance of the same cog. My personal value-over-replacement in these settings feels close to zero. So how could such a life make the world better?

There's a few ways I could think about this.

• it's a fundamentally anxious, judgmental, unhealthy way to look at the world
• it's self-aggrandizing. the goal is to participate. who cares if I'm better than other people? why do I need a special role? if the machine is doing good stuff, then being part of the machine is an honor and a privilege.
• it's connected to a real insecurity, a real fear of losing agency, of being a non-player character. I don't want to let any system tell me what to do.
• but it's also connected to a real insight, a passion, a love. the system is bad, and it's not fixing itself, so the only way for it to get better is for me to bring something new and unique to the mix.

Sometimes there's value in doing more or helping to do something faster.

• Unlike, say, medicine, where the supply of doctors in the US is fixed by a cartel (the AMA), there is no fixed supply of engineers. So any engineering I do is increasing the supply of engineering. Even if someone else would have done the same thing, that someone is now free to do something else.
• If a lifesaving drug would still be invented without my help, but I can help it happen a few days earlier, so that it saves some extra lives, that's a big contribution.

On the other hand, there is real value in having a personal view of what's important, because systems definitely don't always or even usually get this right. There's no problem if my personal view happens to align with some existing effort --- this is validation for joining that effort and finding my people --- but the world does benefit greatly from diversification (one of the few universal 'free lunches'), so all else equal there's a lot of value in adding a unique perspective.