Writing science fiction and building my first game
A mother chooses between buying medicine and buying food. Parents skip a meal so the children can eat. A man works seven days a week because stopping means the household falls short. These are not extraordinary situations. They are the daily arithmetic of households where income does not reliably cover what a family needs to function. The decisions that poverty forces are not simply inconvenient. They consume the attention, the energy, and the time that everything else in a person's life depends on.
In many parts of the world, serious problems — poverty, unemployment, poor health, failing local economies — are met with solutions that arrive from outside. Experts come in, assess the situation, design an intervention, and implement it. The people who live with the problem are consulted, if at all, late in the process and on narrow terms. The assumption underneath this pattern, rarely stated but consistently acted on, is that the people closest to the problem are not the ones best placed to solve it.
In many communities, people have developed ways of solving problems, organizing work, and sustaining daily life that are specific to where they live and what they have. That knowledge is practical, accumulated over time, and held by the people who use it. When outside help arrives, whether from governments, development organizations, or private companies, it frequently arrives with its own methods and its own assumptions about what the community needs. The local knowledge is set aside, sometimes without anyone deciding to set it aside.
We are trained to see work as the place where we prove our worth: climb higher, deliver more, outperform everyone. Most of our day goes to tasks that test our skills but ignore or even undermine the deeper parts of us that make us better, stronger human beings. We often become more efficient but less whole.
