The Concept  💭

I spent time envisioning a campaign where the most impactful non-profits on the planet come together to help solve some of the biggest problems in the world. The effort would begin in the United States, then quickly expand internationally, starting with the nations who are in most need of support.

This is a world where everyone's well-being is prioritized and the goal is to get as many people living their most fulfilled and fun-filled lives as possible. This is an awareness campaign to highlight the improvements we are all collectively making in the world thanks to the generous contributions from donors, philanthropists, as well as the work everyone is doing to get the proper systems in place that will create an environment where everyone can thrive no matter where they live in the world.

The chart gives you a visual representation of how much better the world could get if people simply decided to shift their attention towards the things that contribute the most to living a happy and meaningful life. With key milestones being marked by the dates on the timeline and a look ahead at how we can progress even further next year.

In general, with this project, I wanted to err on the side of realism as much as possible because (on their own) the models can't come close to matching reality (as far as my eyes are concerned). My process included ideating, pondering some of the biggest aspects of life that are holding people back, plucking some inspiration from my archives (for the visuals), getting the information to generate properly, and displaying it on the screens I had in mind.

The "Why?" Behind Each Statistic ☺️

Government Corruption: The amount of government corruption in the world is easily one of the most devastating plagues to society. It’s all-pervasive, yet so little attention is brought to it.

Having a corrupt government is like having a world full of deplorable parents who are chronically lying to you, vehemently abusive, highly discriminatory, entirely untrustworthy, constantly stealing from you, conniving, manipulative, two-faced, narcissistic, perpetually insecure, dictatorial, and rife with bottomless greed and then miraculously expecting all the kids in the world to turn out like top-tier saints.

It’s one of the worst aspects of society, it continuously goes unmentioned, is practically everywhere you look, and it holds the entire planet back more than anything else in the world.

It would honestly be so easy to quickly fix so many of the world’s problems if the right people, along with honest and transparent human-centered systems, were in place to support everyone. Smart, willing, and highly capable people are everywhere. There’s no shortage of people who could be solving a myriad of the world’s most important problems.

The issue is that the corrupt governments and corporations continuously stifle and erode their efforts to make significant progress. Greed-laced, centralized-controlled systems constantly plotting behind closed doors are never going to lead to a prosperous world. Especially not when everyone in the room is purely driven by their own ego.

Transparency.org tracks the level of government corruption for more than 180 countries, and every year they release their Corruption Perceptions Index that shows you where each country stands. You can take a second to guess the global average level of corruption. The scale ranges from 0 to 100. Zero means a nation is highly corrupt. The global average is an appalling forty-two out of one hundred. Needless to say, corruption is rampant across most governments around the world and it's what truly holds humanity back, not a lack of ability among individual people.

As with many lists ranking anything positive, the Nordics top the charts as being some of the least corrupt nations on Earth, taking 4 of the top 6 spots.

Obesity Rates: Around 40% of Americans are obese. That's 2 out of every 5 people you meet. The global average is around 16% for adults. Obesity leads to a slew of health diseases, so addressing this is vital to helping citizens.

Heart Diseases: Cause nearly 32% of all deaths globally. That's insane, a symptom of a very tumultuous world no doubt.

Cancers: Are responsible for around 15% of deaths on the planet. China (2,574,176), India (916,827), and the US (605,761) make up 42.1% of all cancer deaths (the global total is 9,743,832). Expectedly as these are 3 of the most populous nations.

Real Wages: Refer to how much you earn after taking inflation into account. When real wages increase, it means you can buy more while doing the same amount of work.

Median Household Income: So people can comfortably meet their needs, have fun and grow as an individual.

Cost of Living: Because you shouldn't have to work just to live.

Guaranteed Minimum Income: GMI is the sibling to universal basic income. UBI would work if the appropriate and fair systems were in place, but many nations are far from achieving that at the moment. GMI specifically aims to help those who don't already earn enough to live on.

It's designed to raise the standard of living for the ones who need it most. All while working to build the infrastructure that would allow them to more easily support themselves. It's the first step that would subsequently lead to UBI once governments get the proper implementation sorted out.

Governments have to learn to walk before they can leap, and GMI would be the first step in that process. Such a system would greatly contribute to the next three categories below, especially the meaning and purpose people derive from life.

The amount of conflict, corruption and greed that results from people's insatiable desire to accumulate more money likely eclipses all of the turmoil caused by people arguing about both politics and religion combined.

Other interesting human-centered concepts include: universal basic services, participation income, sovereign wealth funds that give dividend payments to residents; in Alaska everyone gets a portion of the money from the state's oil revenue. And this happens on a yearly basis.

That would be so cool if nations incentivized people to make changes with huge positive benefits for everyone like:

"Reduce crime by 75% and we'll give everyone a portion of the money we save from incarceration and increased tourist revenue.

Get your family's health in check and we'll give everyone a portion of the extortion-level costs we charge you for healthcare.

If 80% of the country switches to renewables we'll pass on some of the health, environmental and energy savings to everyone."

And if residents of places with highly developed industries shared some of their revenue with citizens. Like California with Hollywood, Portugal, Florida, Spain, and the Maldives with tourism, Germany and Michigan with cars, Iowa with agriculture and manufacturing, California with an insane tech industry, China’s with tech and manufacturing, South Korea and Japan's electronics, and Swiss banking.

Life Satisfaction: I had a "life satisfaction improved by .88" stat, but some of the joy must have inevitably rubbed off on me, and in my blissful state of utter contentment, I got swept away in a cloud of merriment and neglected to include it in the campaign 🙃

The metric stems from one of my favorite annual reports, the World Happiness Report. Where they take more than 140 countries and have their citizens rank their quality of life from a scale of 1-10. This is the kind of annual release that should regularly receive far more attention than so many other purely entertainment based shows that are forgotten within days and have no lasting impact on most people's lives.

Finland has been the happiest country in the world for 9 years straight, yet you never hear a single thing about how other countries are trying to learn from them to better serve their people. Nations will copy the most restrictive laws to suppress people's free speech and right to information, but they won't work to make people's lives better by treating them like humans in the first place.

The Nordic countries make up 5 of the top 6 happiest countries on Earth. But guess who weens its head into the fray?

Costa Rica as the 4th happiest country in the world (last year they were 6th).

And for some context, nearly 30% of Costa Ricans lived below the national poverty line in 2020. In 2023, it was 24.4%. That number has since dropped to 15.2% in 2025. Yet even despite these high rates of poverty, Costa Rica still ranks far happier than the United States. (Costa Rica also spends 34.6% of what the United States does on its people. In part because the country doesn't make nearly as much, and also because the US is woefully inefficient, downright wasteful, and not transparent in how their money is actually used.)

But as it relates to this category as a whole, what better way to track progress than to see how much more people are enjoying their lives compared to previous years?

I love that someone is out there focused on people's well-being. That's exactly what the world should be looking to improve the most.

Meaning and Purpose: The productivity, supreme health, happiness, lack of crime, incredibly helpful innovations, inventions and creative work that will come about when society helps more people align with this will be phenomenal. Just think about how happy everyone will be when they are all off doing the things they love the most in life.

Close Relationships: You know, relationships...just the most important thing in the world.

Society does not put enough emphasis on the importance of these and how people should seek to foster quality ones (which means they themselves have to be the kind of person they would love to be all buddy-buddy with).

Collectively, these categories represent a world where society, corporations, and governments are actually focused on humans’ well-being and flourishing, not just eternally trying to sell them things they don't need in an endless pursuit of "this is never going to be enough for me anyways" profit.

(And of course this isn't an exhaustive list by any means)

Feedback:

I'll keep feedback short because otherwise it would be incredibly extensive.

It's great (and much appreciated) that you provided some starter credits.

The Generating Screen: It would be cool if you could show a rough bit of the process, like each of the pixels slowly materializing to form your image. The digital equivalent of a printer head swishing back and forth to create your picture. It would be wise to have a satisfying animation for such a common process (especially one you want to encourage), but I understand that specific one might not be feasible, so instead I'd show some helpful tips about how to use the product during the generating screen. But that alone would get boring and people would eventually learn so you could do: quotes, mention new changes and features, definitely a visually appealing progress bar of some sort, users' past iterations, past projects, inspiration that's relevant to the users’ project, etc. are some things that could optionally be available for people to see on the screen.

Very rarely you could ask/remind people they can give feedback especially if you're looking to improve a certain area of the product, see how they like a particular change, ask them what their biggest complaint about the software is, what feature they would want to see added most etc. On occasion, you could even give out random credits to people on the generating screen, especially if they've been working on a project for a while and/or are using a lot of credits. That's an easy way to reward product use and (my favorite) pleasantly surprise people. Variable rewards (when done ethically) can be quite effective and beneficial to both parties. Be nice to users and reward their loyalty and it will come back in kind.