The path to greatness doesn’t always begin with good intentions.
I’ve wasted so much energy trying to purify my motives, to be morally clean, to stay consistent with values I barely understood. Radical idealism drained me. Maybe I called it “istiqomah”, persistence, but it was just stubbornness, or sunk cost fallacy dressed up as virtue.
The uncomfortable truth: many of the greatest things in the world didn’t start with “good” intentions.
War gave birth to the computer and the internet.
Porn, for better or worse, pushed internet innovation forward.
Gaming, often mocked as pointless, is the reason NVIDIA exists and why AI experiments like DeepMind could even happen.
Things we dismiss as bad, useless, or immoral often drive the things we now call great.
The crypto world is another example.
Right now, blockchain is mostly used for speculation and gambling. But that’s how innovation starts: with noise, chaos, and misuse.
When I bought access to OpenRouter using USDC on Base, the experience was smooth, better than traditional payment systems. That only happens because there’s a need for alternatives. And let’s be honest: decentralized applications only truly matter when governments are corrupt.
The paradox:
If a government is competent and honest, people don’t need crypto.
But how do you know a government is trustworthy?
To believe that takes faith. The kind people usually reserve for religion.
Crypto is a sandbox. A fail-safe.
A decentralized contingency plan in case trust collapses.
And that’s why, regardless of the scams, the nonsense, the gambling, it should still exist.
In Indonesia, we see it clearly:
Politicians don’t care about being competent. They care about appearing competent just enough to stay in power.
So they keep people poor. Then give handouts.
Then say: “Look, we care.”
And maybe that’s why I think the way I do.
I’m always looking for the positive hidden in the destructive, not out of optimism, but out of pattern recognition.
This isn’t “intellection” or intellectualism.
It’s just refusing to put things into neat categories like good or bad.
Some things are just part of other things.
Not all relationships are causal. Not all ideas are exclusive.
So what do we do?
We prepare.
We carry the umbrella, even if it doesn’t rain.
And if it doesn’t rain, maybe the umbrella keeps us from burning under the sun.