Technology – inquiring life

Blockchain With a Purpose

Note: This is not investment advice – just an exploration of how mission-driven blockchain tech is built and used in the real world.

Back in college, I remember hearing about Bitcoin, which at the time was trading for well under a dollar. I was interested, but I figured it was probably just a fad, or at best, a clever idea that would fizzle out. And honestly, it seemed complicated. Wallets, private keys, exchanges – it felt like more trouble than it was worth for a busy college student.

Fast forward to 2019. I had stayed on the sidelines when it came to cryptocurrency, just watching from a distance. However, I was using Keybase (a secure messaging and cryptography platform) for work when they announced something called the “Spacedrop.” Users would receive free Stellar Lumens (XLM), the native asset of the Stellar network. I received a few XLM and decided that I might as well learn what it was all about. The airdrop didn’t last long – scammers, gaming the system, eventually forced an early shutdown – but by then, I’d found my way into the Stellar community and started learning about blockchain in earnest.

What is the Singularity?

In recent years – first in science fiction, and now increasingly in tech headlines – a particular word has begun to surface more and more often: Singularity.

Originally, this term was used by mathematicians (describing points where equations break down) and physicists (most famously, when discussing black holes). But today, if you’re hearing it in conversations about technology, it likely means something else – generally referring to computing power, artificial intelligence, and exponential change.

The recent leaps in AI may just seem like new tools for making quick work of essays or generating memes. They are much more than that, though – they mark the beginning of a profound shift that will, sooner or later, ripple through every part of our lives. It’s worth taking a few minutes now to explore what the Singularity actually is, what it could mean for us, and how we might begin to prepare for it.

Doomscrolling and the Global Shallows

The phrase “doomscrolling”, which was first popularized during the COVID pandemic, describes a behavior pattern that goes back even further than that – at least to the dawn of social media. If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling your Facebook timeline for the fifth time in an hour, re-reading the same (often negative) posts because your brain is hooked on checking for a tiny drip of new information, you’ve participated in the phenomenon. It’s closely tied to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), a term coined in 2004 just as the internet was really finding its place in the hearts and minds of people around the world.

What’s changed in recent years is the sheer scale of it. Our ancestors might have worried about their town, their family, their crops. We, on the other hand, are handed an endless feed of every war, every disaster, every outrage – filtered through algorithms designed to keep us hooked. There’s a strange social pressure to stay informed about everything, as if not knowing about a faraway tragedy makes us complicit or self-absorbed. But is this constant exposure actually increasing our depth of compassion – or stretching it too thin to be useful, at the expense of our spiritual and mental health? When everything feels urgent, it’s hard to tell what actually deserves our attention. Our desire to stay deeply informed about the world can end up making our empathy surprisingly shallow.