Frustration and Brilliance and Late-night Infomercials

My last post was about hard questions without good answers.

(Somehow, it turns out it was also about cats wearing space suits.) 

Because really when you come right down to it,
maybe Catstronaut is the answer after all?

While I was thinking about all that, it occurred to me that what controversy and frustration really come from is the mismatch between how bad a problem is (ENORMOUSLY bad) and how adequate the solution is (WOEFULLY inadequate). 

By extension, I wonder how many of the world's issues can be charted out according to how well-matched the problems and solutions are.

Problems can range from being no big deal (toast with the crust still on it) all the way up to indescribably awful (life/death/dismemberment/catastrophe/war).

Solutions can range from being completely useless (battery-powered light-up pepper grinder) to beautifully life-changing (cataract surgery restoring sight to the blind).

When the magnitude of the problem and the solution matches up, you're on the green line here:

If you could boil down the stuff our sincerest most human goals and aspirations are made of;

if you could condense the very essence of what parents want their children to grow up to do,

it would be that we find the perfect solutions for the hardest problems. Cure cancer! Clean up the SuperFund sites! Make Donald Trump's hair look good! Do something worthy of a Nobel Prize! Solve political corruption in Latin America! Build a better mousetrap! Move humanity forward!

It would be where the Green zone sits on this matrix:

Green is what we all dream of accomplishing in our lives: Finding an authentic answer to an enormous and profound problem. It's establishing accessible clean water in developing countries. It's implementing the affordable effective vaccine that eradicated smallpox worldwide. It's the innovatively-engineered retrofits that brought Apollo 13 home.

At the other end of that line where problems and solutions are well-matched, you've got ineffective solutions to problems that aren't really problems. It's the Yellow zone of the graph.

Yellow is a place for all those life hacks on Facebook. They don't actually work but it doesn't matter because the problem wasn't that big of a deal anyway. Solutions...or not... for problems... or not... doesn't really matter, doesn't really stir up a heated debate, doesn't inspire brilliant efforts. Meh?...or not.

But what happens when a brilliant mind pours blood, sweat, tears, time, and mental energy into finding the perfect solution to a tiny problem? A problem that wasn't really worth spending so much brain power on?  That's the Blue zone on the graph:

Blue is late night infomercial products and virtually everything in the now-defunct SkyMall catalogues -- great solutions to problems that never actually bothered you all that much.  Blue is 6 misspent years doing ingenious work to get a hard-earned PhD on a pointless topic, making a substantial contribution to a field no one cares about, then going on to work at Starbucks. Blue is where brilliance is wasted.

What if the effort going toward the Blue zone could be reallocated? What if all that phenomenal cosmic effort were pointed toward phenomenal cosmic problems?
The place where we have staggering, seemingly-insurmountable problems and woefully inadequate solutions is the Red zone on the matrix:

Red is traumatic optic neuropathy and CPR in space and cold fusion and the Syrian refugee crisis and trying to raise good children in a rough world. Crushingly difficult issues with no good answer, no matter how much we wish we had a good answer. It's a churning, struggling, unsatisfying, painful place. The Red zone is full of things worth arguing about and problems worth grappling with.

I'd hazard a guess that everything that has ever arrived to the Green zone was in the Red zone first.
That means that frustration and controversy are only bad things if we sit around angrily-but-ineffectually stewing about them, rather than actively pushing them along the pathway toward the Green zone.

So there it is. Red, Yellow, Green, or Blue.
What are you spending your life on right now?