There's a word I put unusual emphasis on, which helps me think about the world. In my culture I'd have a special word for it but it's close enough to the common English term "baseline."

Baseline /ˈbāsˌlīn/ noun. A minimum or starting point used for comparisons.

I endeavor to leave the world better than the baseline state in which I found it. I think you should do this as well.

I.

Wherever you're reading this, I want you to stop and take a look around the world. Maybe you're in your room sitting at your computer. Maybe you're in the park under the sunshine, skimming this on your phone. Wherever it is, take five seconds and consider the area you're in. 

Is there anything about the area that could be better?

II.

For this essay, I want call your attention to that baseline. 

The baseline is the way things were before you showed up or started doing things. Most often it's on a short time scale like minutes or hours, though the exact time scale varies. Sometimes it's longer, and the longer it gets, the more you can extrapolate- if you've been doing a lot of things for a long time, the baseline of the situation is what things would have been like if you'd never showed up but time had continued to advance. For this use, I think it's not helpful to go for complicated hypotheticals when thinking about the baseline. If it starts getting complicated then the idea is less useful, though still sometimes brought up. 

There's a little ditch just over a low stone wall near my apartment. For whatever reason the ditch is a common place for people to toss litter, especially alcohol containers but also litter in general. 

Sometimes when I walk by the ditch, I lean over the wall and pick up a bottle or two to toss in the recycling bin at the end of the block. Sometimes I don't. 

If you're looking at the two pictures, you may have some real trouble figuring out what's different; here I grabbed the water bottle near the bag and the Gatorade bottle near that branch on the mid right. In my culture, it'd be noted that I've obviously made the ditch better than the baseline. 

(Yes, this is related to the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics. My culture thinks the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics is bad, and wants something which is not that.) 

Both in the hypothetical world run on my norms and in the real world we actually live in, sometimes the changes aren't obviously net positive or negative. If you mine a bunch of ore maybe it's bad that you did some environmental damage but good to have more ore in the economy. If you paint a mural on the wall and some people like the art and others think it's worse than a blank wall, well, that happens. There's an obligation not to make things straightforwardly worse than the baseline, and people try to appreciate even small-but-unambiguous improvements to the baseline.

You looked at the area around you earlier. If you saw something that could be better, and you could make it better in thirty seconds or so, I'd appreciate it if you went and improved it. Make the world better than the baseline.

III.

The way I solve many of my problems is by chipping away at them.

I clean my office one stray index card at a time. I sit down to work each morning and start with one email at a time. I do try and take time to plan the long term strategy at least once or twice a year, because it'd be easy to spend all my time mopping the floors on the Titanic otherwise, but when I look back at my career I think my most impressive work has been iterative work improving things a little here, a little there.

Professionally it can make more sense to spend a few hours getting to inbox zero. Many things are more efficiently solved by focused work for hours. Certainly I think I could clean up the litter over that little wall given an afternoon of work, a trash bag, and a pair of garden gloves. Then it would be clean and perhaps even green again. Cleaning that area completely would be a large improvement from baseline.

The problem is it would be a large improvement from baseline fueled entirely by me.

IV.

I don't litter. Haven't since I was a small child. Part of that was growing up in a community that valued the environment and the natural spaces we were part of. Part of it is that, in a small enough community and a rural enough area, you know that the trash you leave on your backwoods trail is only going to be picked up by you as well. I don't want to leave the area worse than it was when I got there.

Enough people like me would erode away the trash by dint of passing through and each removing one or two pieces of debris. The small slips where unavoidable accident or necessary emergency required leaving a snickers wrapper on a grassy hill would be easily handled by the tide of folks trying to make the world a little better.

I don't bother putting a few hours into cleaning that spot of litter. I'm too badly outnumbered by people who make the baseline worse. Once in a while someone does clean it up, and within a week or two the area is back to trashed. It makes me sympathetic to gated communities and homeowners associations. It wouldn't even take actual work for a society full of me to keep that area clean; litter doesn't spontaneously generate. All it would take is having everyone avoid making the place worse than baseline.

I want to repeat again that not every change can be a straightforward improvement.

Once upon a time, someone came to the green and growing open space that is Boston, and they raised brick after brick and steel girder after steel girder. Downtown Boston is no longer green and growing. In exchange we got something else marvelous, living spaces and working spaces many stories high, a shipping port that can take goods coming from around the world and bring me mango and pomegranate and pens and frisbees and kites. This is perhaps an improvement on net, but I don't want to claim it's a straightforward one.

Sensitivity to what is straightforwardly better than baseline seems useful, as well as a humble and well calibrated sense of what's mostly an improvement, and what's overwhelmingly an improvement. It's not that I don't want anyone to ever do the complicatedly better things, or to try ideas with positive expected value that turn out badly. But I do think it's underappreciated how small improvements compound.

V.

There's a beautiful vision of incremental utopia I can see sometimes, overlaid like a mirage over the world around me. 

Many hands make light work. Tasks that are a heavy load to bear alone become trivial investments when made by dozens or hundreds. Some of my favourite music has long been choir songs or acapellas with layer after layer of the singer's voice overlaid one atop the other. You can make something beautiful if if everyone pitches in a bit. You can even make something beautiful all on your own as long as you get a little bit better every day, and nobody comes along to carelessly knock over what you're building.

Contrary-wise, I often say I'm mad at the right people for the wrong reasons. What makes me made are the small frictions, windows broken just for fun, the pointless rudeness that achieves nothing. Littering. Things that make the baseline worse without achieving anything else. 

Sometimes I dream that the gap between the real world and the utopia in my imagination is people being happy making small, repeated improvements to baseline.