There is often a real sense of nostalgia for experiences that aren't my own, specifically being able to travel the world and write about whatever comes into your head... and yet, the romanticism of the idea made it seem nothing but aspirational; something entirely out of reach and a way to spend your time that has no place in the modern world.

We're told stories as children of adventurers and explorers who discover lands of wonder, and experience things that are entirely new, writers, poets, painters even... people who have this apparent freedom to do as they please, or fulfil their own desires seemingly without having to function as a productive member of society.

Now, I'm sure that the truth is very different of course, and that maybe even Columbus was sent across the ocean as a punishment and it may have been an experience he truly hated.

History has a funny way of telling only half the story, the one that suits the popular narrative of the day. This is why letters and journals are so much more interesting to me. They are the individual telling their truth about things as they saw and experienced them.

Your truth of course will always contrast with the way everyone else would tell the same story. We all have unconscious bias and our own perceptions and understanding of things that will always result in a very different narrative, but it's this beauty in individuality that makes the human experience so interesting.

It's why despite there being seemingly nothing new to experience, or no new stories to be told, it just simply isn't true. As a great many others before me have done, I too find myself exploring and writing about a world that's just waiting to be discovered; knowing the world they explored before me is entirely different from the world I'm living in now.

Heck, even as I write this, 120 years from now there will be no one alive on earth that is alive today, and the way the world will look in 2144 is just as unimaginable to me as the way it would've looked in 1904.

1904 was only 1 year after the Wright Brothers first successfully flew a powered aircraft, 4 years before the introduction of Ford Motor Company's Model T, 8 years before the sinking of The Titanic and a whole decade before the start of World War I.

The advancements, inventions and scientific progress we've made in the last 120 years have moved forward at a speed and scope far greater than I'm sure anyone alive in the early 20th Century could have imagined. In fact, folks who did speak of a future that exists now were openly ridiculed and mocked for such outlandish ideas. The same happens even now, Elon Musk being a prime example.

Now, that's not to say I like him or agree with his way of viewing things, but there is no questioning that he is a visionary, and his companies and the people that work for them have contributed to some incredibly important technological advances. It's clear some of the worlds smartest and brilliant people are doing their best work under his leadership, and despite how either you or I might feel about him as an individual, I truly believe that collectively those individuals are working towards a better future for all.

We are at such a pivotal moment in our history, where the actions of the past have resulted in catastrophic harm to a great many people, and the solutions required to solve them require radical thinking. Radical ideas are by their very nature outlandish and divisive, and a great many people will resist them. Scholars and historians of the future will wonder why no-one did anything when those ideas and solutions seem so obvious, as I do with certain things now.

But the answer is that it's just really not that simple. Our experiences as humans and the societies we've built are inherently complex, and change, even on a biological level, takes many generations to occur. Hindsight of course is a blessing, it helps us to learn from mistakes, but we can only learn from them if we make mistakes in the first place. There is really so much to say on this, and the idea of perfectionism, but evolution in any sense of the word is as a result of imperfection and it's entirely necessary for growth.

My truth at least, or the way I see the world right now is that everyone is trying their best. Everyone is doing what they believe will be of benefit to others, even if those actions (consciously or not) result in harm. It's a question of ethics, and the thought experiments around "The Trolley Problem" are to me the most representative of the challenges we face individually every single day. Objectively, a lot of our decisions are seemingly of little consequence, but to the person making the decision in that moment it can be the hardest thing they've ever had to do. This makes it incredibly difficult to see the bigger picture, to think objectively about the long term, and to even imagine a world beyond tomorrow.

But I'm trying my best. I'm trying so desperately to have hope... to have hope that things will be better tomorrow, that we will have equity, freedom, and peace; that kindness, love, and compassion for others will be the common values that bind us all, and become embedded deeply in more than just our individual value systems... that my actions as an individual today result in as little harm as possible tomorrow, not just to other people, but to the world and environment around me as a whole.

Lately I've been thinking deeply about my legacy, and knowing that I won't have children, about what I can leave behind.

And so, despite my aspirations to quit my job and just travel and write like those great adventurers before me, I know that my place is in the work that I do at Apple, and despite the unrelenting demand for consumption and growth at any cost, it will be of net benefit to anyone who calls our planet home...

My hope is that my work there will see me advocate for, and contribute to, significant and extensive policy change, long term and sustained investment in ecosystem restoration and accelerated CO2e emissions reduction. There is also no question that my drive for equity and fairness will see me advocate for repatriations to communities where raw material consumption has left deep scars in the landscape.

I truly believe that together we can build a sustainable future, where ecology and sound environmental science become the foundational pillars of modern society, and the individuals that come to inherit it have the same sense of hope that I do now.

I hope that you do too.