Why don’t we___?

Why do we produce luxury cars while people are dying in poor countries?

Why do we work on missions to Mars while our own planet has problems?

Why is Starbuck’s revenue is 26,5 billion dollars, while malaria would cost 8.5 billion dollars to eradicate?

Why do we worry about climate change if nuclear weapons are a more immediate threat?

These trick questions see humanity as one entity.

There are almost eight billion people on Earth, each with their own thoughts and skills, and interests. And we should pursue those interests and ideas, whether they’re ground coffee from Seattle or putting people on Mars.

Ground coffee leads to cafés and exchanging of ideas, and putting people on Mars may make our lives better on this planet too. Possibly every step required to put people and materials on Mars is directly useful for figuring out how else we might live on Earth too.

Latest

Searching for meadows

Searching for meadows

Our new home in the Netherlands sits in a mundane residential area full of young families like ours. The street name comes from made (‘meadow’), still referring to a field that once lay here and now survives only in the name. And cycling through the villages around Hattem, I keep meeting names like it. Nearby […]
August 5, 2026
Degrees of wealth

Degrees of wealth

In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China? Neither question is […]
July 11, 2026
Goodbye to Guanyin

Goodbye to Guanyin

It’s a Saturday morning, and we’re in a taxi on the way to the airport. My clothes cling to my body and already reek of sweat, and that’s even before our 12-hour flight has started. Today I woke up at 5:30 to get up early and throw away the last furniture and items we used […]
June 30, 2026
Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Learning Chinese, or any language, makes you more aware of language in general. And one thing that surprised me is that, despite Mandarin being so different from my mother tongue (Dutch), both languages reach for the same units when weighing things: the kilogram (公斤, gōngjīn) and the half-kilogram (斤, jīn). It’s a small thing, but […]
June 24, 2026