10 minutes is a powerful distance. If you walk, take public transit or drive for just 10 minutes from where you currently are you are likely to encounter another human being who either has way less or way more resources (i.e money, assets, human networks) than yourself. Similarly information can travel much faster than us as humans. Within 10 minutes of latency you can easily communicate across our planet and even with the Sun, Mercury, Venus and sometimes Mars. We as human beings have super powers where any person with a digital device can communicate with anyone on this planet within 10 minutes, but we are limited by our own personal limitations on how much we can travel in 10 minutes. Is that a bug or a feature?

I have always tried to make sense of the gaps of human flourishing I see near me. Let me explain. I grew up in India near a slum. I was trying to make sense of the disparity 10 minutes away from me. Two people in the city of Pune, one lives under a concrete roof, another below a roof that leaks and can get destroyed by one rain storm. How did we get here as a society? 

For me there were two ways to look at these situations, one was with apathy and the other curiosity. I personally always preferred curiosity instead of apathy. Curiosity helped me direct my attention towards meaningful action. 

As a 14 year old trying to grapple with these questions seemed like a futile attempt. I am one of those people who are perpetually trying to find their purpose in life and always falling short. I rarely get stuck though, I always feel that I have the agency to take some action to move forward. The only way to update our beliefs is to take action and observe the outcomes based on the prior beliefs. This leads to better posterior beliefs. 

One of the first answers I heard from the adults and media around me that made sense was that bad politicians have caused all this suffering. So I tried to grapple with the question if I should try to make a career in becoming a good politician. This was also around the time I read My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi. Turns out he was a politician. My teenager brain was even more confused. If the father of the nation of India is a good politician, how did we as the country, India end up here? 

I kept a little bit of Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence and the ability to keep fighting the good fight relentlessly with me. I started looking for more other role models. This was the time that I encountered computers and by extension Bill Gates & Linus Torvalds. I saw each of them contributing to a better society through their work in very different ways within the same field. Naively I thought good software would make the world a better place, at least the places like Silicon Valley. I was wrong again. On arriving in San Francisco, you walk a few blocks from the headquarters of multiple multi-billion dollar companies and the people living 10 minutes away from them still cannot afford to put food on the table or pay rent. How did Silicon Valley end up here? 

My core belief that keeps getting challenged is that smart, intelligent, well-meaning people who can create businesses out of nothing, win complex political campaigns and discover cures for COVID-19 collectively live in a society where getting access to clean water or food for every human being is not a global reality. Why? 

I don’t have all the answers, I don’t even know if I am asking the right questions. The only thing I know is that I have to be aware of people 10 minutes away in whatever I do. Keep learning through curiosity and believe in myself to keep taking action. I hope that my actions can have a sliver of impact on moving us towards a shared reality where the next generation should never have to grapple with these same questions all over again.