Keepers of the Seeds
Unsplash / Reed Geiger
The world at planetary scale
Most mornings start the same way. Before the tea is brewed, your phone has already delivered the world: a new AI model that can apparently do half of someone's job, a war entering another winter, a wildfire season that no longer really ends, a round of layoffs at a company that was hiring aggressively a year ago. Then you close the screen, pour the tea, and open an email asking whether some meeting can move to Thursday.
Both things are real. That is what makes it so disorienting. We are asked to care about the fate of the planet and some meeting in the same ten minutes, and nobody tells us how to hold the two together.
If you have been feeling tired in a way that sleep does not quite fix, this piece is for you. I have been feeling it too: a background hum telling me that the world is moving faster than I can understand it, and that whatever I do on an ordinary Tuesday is hopelessly small next to all of it.
I want to think that it’s worth honestly feeling through. I’m not going to try to talk you out of it, but instead suggest asking better questions.
We’re Seeing too much
Let us start with what is true. The problems are not imaginary. AI is changing work faster than most institutions can adapt. Conflict and polarization are real. The climate is changing and species are disappearing. Many workplaces have become more demanding and less forgiving. Feeling unsettled by all this is not a weakness. It is a sign that you are still paying attention and that you care. Feeling bad about all of this, is exactly the right thing to do.
It is also worth remembering that our generation is not the first one to feel that the ground is shaking beneath us. In the spring of 1946, less than a year after the first atomic bombs, George Orwell admitted that every February since 1940 he had found himself thinking that this time winter was going to be permanent. People have lived through dark decades before, and they did not get to know how things would turn out either.
What is new is the volume and intensity. During most of history, people heard about trouble mainly from their own village, at a pace roughly matched to their ability to respond. A flood upriver was news you could do something about. Today we receive every crisis on Earth, in high definition, on the same device that holds our work email and our family photos, and from where we sit we can act on almost none of it.
That gap between what we see and what we can influence is, I think, the real source of a lot of modern exhaustion. Information without agency turns into anxiety. Repeat it every morning for a few years and it starts to feel like the truth about you: that your efforts do not register, that you are a spectator to your own era.
Work adds its own layer. Markets reward speed, and every new tool raises an uncomfortable question for anyone who makes things for a living: will what I do still be needed? Life starts to feel like a race you must keep winning just to stay where you are. It shouldn’t be like that.
The wrong unit of measurement
Here is the thought that changed how I carry all this.
When we feel powerless, we are usually measuring our actions against the size of the problems. One person against the climate. One team against an industry being reshaped by AI. One voice, one vote, one careful day of work against the whole tide of history. Measured that way, every action fails. It has to. It is like weighing a letter on a scale built for trucks and concluding that the letter weighs nothing.
The letter is not nothing. It is just on the wrong scale.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born into slavery and knew a great deal about limited power, opened his Handbook with a simple division: some things are up to us, and some things are not. Our judgments, intentions, and actions belong to us. Other people's choices, the economy, and the course of history do not. His advice was not to stop caring about the second category. It was to stop handing our peace of mind over to it.
This is often misread as permission to shrug. Actually, it is the opposite. Marcus Aurelius wrote much of his Meditations in army camps on the empire's frontier, during a reign also scarred by a devastating epidemic. His private notes keep returning to the same instruction: get up and do the work of a human being, even when nothing is guaranteed.
There is a difference between accepting the facts and accepting the verdict. Accepting the facts means saying: I cannot personally end this war, redesign this economy, or decide the future of AI. Accepting the verdict means concluding: so nothing I do matters. The first is wisdom. The second is despair dressed up as realism.
The useful question is not "Can I fix this?" It is "What is mine to do, and am I doing it well?"
A matter of common decency
Albert Camus explored this question in The Plague, his 1947 novel about a city sealed off by an epidemic, widely read as an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France. The doctor at its center, Bernard Rieux, has no grand theory of how to defeat the disease and no particular reason to believe he will. He simply keeps treating patients, day after day, while the death toll climbs.
When a journalist named Rambert presses him, Rieux refuses the language of heroism. In Stuart Gilbert's translation, he says that "the only means of fighting a plague is common decency." Asked what that means, he answers: "I don't know what it means for other people. But in my case I know that it consists in doing my job."
There is something almost disappointingly modest about that answer, and that is exactly its power. Camus is not claiming that ordinary work saves the world. He is saying that in a world without guarantees, decency is not a feeling or a slogan. It is a practice, and most of the time it looks like someone doing their part properly.
For most of us, that part is not glamorous. It is the engineer who writes the test nobody asked for, because somewhere a patient will rely on that device. The manager who tells the truth about a deadline instead of the comfortable story. The colleague who notices the new hire quietly drowning and offers to help him. None of this will ever trend or be raved about in LinkedIn. It will also never stop mattering, because the people experiencing it are real.
Tools will keep getting more capable, and some of what we do today will be automated. But deciding what is worth doing, and caring whether it actually helps someone, remains a human responsibility. And while you may have to compete hard, no market can force you to become cruel, careless, or dishonest along the way.
The Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel made a version of this point in his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless. He described a greengrocer who places a party slogan in his shop window, among the onions and carrots. He does not believe it. He does it because everyone does, and refusing might cause trouble. Havel's insight was that entire systems are held together by countless small acts like this, and that when ordinary people begin "living in truth", quietly declining to pretend, those systems turn out to be more fragile than they look.
The scale works in both directions. If small compromises add up to something large, so do small acts of integrity.
Hope is not Lost
Havel spent years in prison for his convictions, long before anyone could have predicted he would become president of a free country. In Disturbing the Peace (1986), he drew a line that has helped me more than almost anything else:
"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
Optimism is a prediction, and predictions can be proven wrong. Hope, in Havel's sense, is a stance. It does not depend on reading the news correctly. It depends on knowing what you believe is worth doing, and doing it.
That kind of hope is also the best defense against cynicism. Cynicism is seductive because it feels like intelligence: it protects us from disappointment and lets us look clear-eyed while doing nothing. But it makes the same mistake as despair. It treats the outcome as already decided.
You can see people clearly, with all their fear and pettiness, and still decide to treat them decently. That is not naivety. It is a decision about who you intend to be.
Choosing what you let in
None of this works if every waking hour is spent absorbing the constant alarm around us. Attention has become the raw material that entire industries are now competing for.
Orwell is a surprising guide here. In his 1946 essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, he wrote with obvious delight about toads waking each spring, and rejected the idea that enjoying such things in dark times was escapism. If we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, he asked, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? Then he closed with this:
"The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it."
Orwell was one of the most politically serious writers of his century. He was not ignoring the darkness. He understood that a person who can no longer notice the spring has already lost part of what was worth defending.
Here are a few practices that have helped me. They will not make the world's problems smaller. They are ways of finding firmer ground to stand on while you face them.
Read the news on purpose. Don’t let that sneak up on you. Choose a time and a few sources that explain rather than make you worry. Being informed once a day is different from being startled constantly.
Draw your circle of influence honestly. Write down where you actually have reach: your work, your team, your household, your neighborhood. Maybe one or two causes. That is your territory, nothing more.
Carry one larger thing together with others. Systemic problems need collective answers, not individual heroics. Join a group, support an organization, lend your skills to something bigger than yourself. Shared burdens are lighter.
Measure your days with different questions. Not only "Did I win?" but "Did I do my part well? Who did I help? What did I leave a little better than I found it?"
Treat rest and asking for help as part of the work. Stepping back is not desertion. Talking to a friend, a colleague, or a professional is not failure. Even Rieux did not fight the plague alone.
The seed keepers
I want to end with a story that has stayed with me.
In September 1941, German forces encircled Leningrad. The siege lasted nearly two and a half years, and hundreds of thousands of residents died, most of them from starvation. In the heart of the city stood the Institute of Plant Industry, built around the life's work of the botanist Nikolai Vavilov. It held one of the largest seed collections in the world, gathered from across the globe: a library of the diversity that future harvests would depend on. Vavilov himself had already been arrested by Stalin's regime. He would later die in prison.
The staff who remained guarded the collection through the siege. They froze in unheated rooms and fought off starving rats. And several of them died of hunger while surrounded by seeds they refused to eat. When the rice specialist Dmitry Ivanov died at his post in January 1942, colleagues found thousands of packets of rice in his office, untouched.
I do not tell this story to suggest that anyone should sacrifice their health for their work. Most of us will mercifully never be asked for anything like it. I tell it because of what those scientists understood. They could not end the siege or stop the war. They could not even be sure anyone would ever plant those seeds. What they could do was keep something valuable alive for people they would never meet.
After the war, the collection was sown again. Its descendants still help plant breeders today.
What is yours to keep
None of us will solve the problems that keep us up at night. Nobody gets to do that alone, and it was never a fair thing to ask of anyone.
But each of us is keeping something. Your craft and the care you put into it. Your honesty when a shortcut would be easier. The patience you show a colleague having a bad week. A friendship, a skill, a neighborhood, a child's belief that the world is still worth exploring. These are seeds too. You will not know which ones will matter most, or who will need them, or when.
The world will keep arriving at planetary scale. You will keep living at human scale. That is not a failure. It is where every meaningful thing has ever actually been done.
So do your part well. Rest when you need to. Find the people who are keeping the same things you are, and keep them together. And on the mornings when it all feels like too much, remember that the earth is still going round the sun, and that somewhere, quietly, someone is still guarding the seeds.
At Supradoc, we talk about harnessing technology for the benefit of people. Moments like this remind us what impact really looks like. It is rarely a headline. Almost always, it is someone simply doing their part with care, for people who are counting on them.
References
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad - George Orwell, Tribune (1946)
Disturbing the Peace - Václav Havel, ch. 5 "The Politics of Hope" (1986, tr. Paul Wilson 1990)
The Power of the Powerless - Václav Havel (1978)
A Matter of Common Decency: What Literature Can Teach Us About Epidemics - NPR (2020), on Albert Camus's The Plague
The inspiring scientists who saved the world's first seed bank - The Guardian (2024)
The Seeds of Starvation - Science History Institute
