The question I’m pondering is: can we truly get to a better world by all of us tending to our tiny corner of it? Or would a truly better world require all those micro actions to be complemented by some grand-scale work?

3D chess is a tired metaphor that will lead you in the wrong direction. Instead, you want to play fractal chess: increase the layers of game that you're playing, not simply the complexity.

It just struck me the other day: our main units of time are a hodgepodge of those determined by an external reality and those that are completely arbitrary. And since time is such a central concept to how we organise our lives in the modern world, it makes me wonder how life would be different if we changed the units…