Photo by Sharosh Rajasekher on Unsplash

I like asking others “What’s next?”. I usually get answers like, the next holiday, the next job, new house, baby on the way, and the likes. And I constantly ask myself the same question and also wonder what’s next for our human race.

We’ve actually come a super long way. From farming by our ancestors to smartphones today that can get us information from the collective human knowledge and experience from the internet. Each major shift gave us a bit more breathing room and freedom to figure out how to live better. But right now, I feel like we’re marching on the spot, endlessly distracted instead of heading towards the next chapter of our progress as human race.

How We Got Here: The Significant Milestones

1. Farming (~10,000 BCE): Stopped hunting for food all day. Surpluses meant people could finally stay put, specialize, and build communities.
2. Writing (~3200 BCE): External memory. Instead of relying on word of mouth or songs passed down, we recorded trade, rules, and hard-earned lessons so they wouldn’t die with us.
3. Early Ethics & Philosophy (~800–200 BCE): The first real frameworks for living together without constant fighting, fairness, basic decency, and civic duty.
4. The Printing Press (~1440 CE): Broke the monopoly on information. Books got cheap, literacy exploded, and ideas started moving super fast.
5. Scientific Method (1500s–1600s): We stopped guessing and started testing. Observations, data, and repeatable proof replaced superstition.
6. Industrialization (1700s–1800s): Mechanized scale. Steam engines and factories replaced backbreaking manual labor, paving the way for modern cities.
7. Sanitation & Medicine (1800s–1900s): Clean water, antibiotics, and vaccines literally doubled human life expectancy in a few generations.
8. Universal Rights (1900s): Establishing baseline protections for individuals, widening access to education, and pushing back against systemic tyranny.

Where We Are Today: The Digital Era

The world became small and bigger at the same time as we connected the world. Information travels instantly anywhere. Survival is no longer the daily struggle for most of the developed world. So our biggest test today isn’t capacity, but focus. Are we building stuff that genuinely improves life, or just doom-scrolling our precious life away?

The past 20-Year Attention Sink

Instead of tackling huge engineering or societal problems, much of the past two decades we got sucked into a loop of digital noise and online ego games.

• The Attention Economy: Social platforms and certain games engineered specifically to keep eyes glued so ad platforms can monetize human screen time.
• Politics & Ego: Online conversations increasingly dominated by political polarization, looking good online, and rage baiting for online engagements rather than productive discussion.
• Misallocated Talent & Resources: Brilliant minds and massive resources funneled into capitalistic gains, military spending rather than fixing tangible physical infrastructure.

I don’t know how to fix this, so simply wrote this…

Course correcting starts with intentionality. We need to reclaim our attention, direct top talent and resources back toward real-world challenges, and restore trust between people.

Technology won’t automatically lead us to a better place, it’s just an accelerator. Where we end up really depends on what we choose to focus on and build next.

So what’s next for you?