Overpopulation is a lie

There’s no such thing as overpopulation, only underdevelopment.

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Someone replied: “So we’re just supposed to level every mountain and cut down every forest?”

This kind of response is rooted in the oldest illusion humanity has yet to outgrow: the belief in fixed pie economics — the myth that there's only so much to go around. It assumes that humans are parasites on Earth rather than the source of its blooming complexity.

But wealth isn't cake, it's fire. Resources are not limited by what's physically present but by what we know how to do with them. Oil was useless until we figured out the internal combustion engine. Silicon was just sand until we figured out semiconductors.

The limiting factor has never been nature — it's been knowledge.

Overpopulation is not a resource problem. It’s a coordination problem. A knowledge problem. A development problem. If you dropped 1,000 humans on a barren asteroid, we’d call it a tragedy. Drop them on fertile Earth with running water and sunlight, and it’s a miracle — unless they don’t know how to cooperate, build, or solve problems. Then it’s just a slow-motion tragedy again.

What we call “scarcity” is just the gap between what we want and what we currently understand. That’s why wealth, unlike gold, is infinite. You don’t run out of music because someone else made a song. You don’t run out of startups because someone else built one. You don’t run out of solutions because someone else solved something.

If your vision of the future requires bulldozing forests and mountains, you’re using yesterday’s tools to build tomorrow’s world. You’re not thinking too big — you’re thinking too small.

Progress doesn’t come from constraint — it comes from creativity. There is no final frontier because frontiers are created by knowledge. And knowledge expands forever.

So no, we don’t need to level every mountain. But we do need to level up how we think.

There is no such thing as perfect — and that's not a flaw, it's a feature. It’s the very mechanism by which the universe improves. If anything could be perfect, progress would stop. Evolution itself would die of boredom.

Perfection is static. Math is dynamic. Life is the process of solving for better — not arriving at best.

If Tesla waited to be perfect, it wouldn't ship. If Facebook were perfect, it wouldn’t still need engineers. The world is run by people willing to launch when it's wrong and iterate while it's moving. The ones still waiting to be ready are waiting for a bus that doesn’t exist.

You're not failing because your idea isn’t perfect. You're failing because you're expecting it to be.

Perfectionism is procrastination with a halo on its head. Iteration is evolution with a calculator in hand.

Mathematically, there is no “final solution” — only better approximations. Every product, every plan, every life is a curve chasing an asymptote. You never arrive. You just get closer.

The winners in life aren’t the ones who get it right the first time. They’re the ones who run more iterations per unit time.

That’s how you win with math. That’s how evolution works. That’s how life compounds.

What does this mean for you?

1. Iterate quickly — Don’t wait for your product, service, or art to be “perfect.” Get it out into the world, learn from it, and improve it.
2. Stop competing for scraps — Instead of worrying about limited space in your niche, think about ways to make your niche bigger. How can you expand your influence and your audience? How can you push the boundaries of your creativity?
3. Embrace imperfection — Recognize that imperfection is part of the creative process. Don’t expect everything to be flawless from the start. Start with what you have, and adjust as you go.
4. Challenge your assumptions — Scarcity is just a story we tell ourselves. If you think there’s not enough room for your idea, challenge that assumption. How can you create more space for yourself, by bringing something new to the table? How can you innovate your way out of the perceived limits?
5. Focus on progress — Every step forward is a step toward something greater. You’re not aiming for perfection. You’re aiming for continuous, incremental improvement.

Creators, in every form, thrive not by avoiding competition but by breaking through boundaries that everyone else has accepted. And that’s where the real power lies: in thinking beyond the obvious, in shifting from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking. There's more than enough room for all of us. You just have to find a new way to use the resources at hand.