Young, talented, and driven people are experiencing complete and utter despair.

Their anxiety is peaking they’re being bombarded daily by a relentless stream of violence, division, and governmental incompetence.

I’m privileged to call some of these people friends, and even more so when they ask me how I manage to stay positive. Until now, I’ve never given my approach a name, but I’ll call it the Kardashev Mindset.

For the uninitiated, the Kardashev Scale is a framework for measuring a civilization’s technological progress based on its energy consumption.

It has three levels:

  1. Type I: A civilization capable of harnessing all the energy available on its home planet (e.g., solar, geothermal, wind).
  2. Type II: A civilization that can utilize the total energy output of its star, potentially via technologies like Dyson Spheres.
  3. Type III: A civilization able to harness the energy of an entire galaxy.

Implicit within this framework are three motivating ideas:

• A belief that humanity is capable of achieving extraordinary civilizational heights.

• Recognition that reaching Type I represents a turning point: an escape velocity that unlocks the abundant, sci-fi future we dream of.

• The sobering realization that failure to achieve Type I likely condemns us to extinction—a cosmic loss of unimaginable potential.

This may seem abstract or overly technocratic, but to me, it offers relief. It forces me to zoom out. Not just to the scale of a country or continent, but across the surface of the planet, back through human history, and forward into a spacefaring future.

This mental and conceptual stretching reminds me of two things:

1. How small we and our current moment in time truly are.
2. How vast, exciting, and achievable the future could be if we individually and collectively choose to build toward it.

If this perspective doesn’t help, or you still don’t get it, I have just the thing:

Watch this video, which zooms from a smiling face at a 10cm scale to the edge of the observable universe, 10 billion light years away, and back again.

đź”— LINK: https://youtu.be/8Are9dDbW24

Breathe in. Zoom out. Build.

GSTK @mprinparr