Return to Zeno

I was talking to a Tesla driver the other day, an engineer who had bought his well before Elon went full on through the looking glass and who seems enamored more than anything by the technology of his car. I asked him his opinion of the thesis that plug-in hybrids were ultimately a better societal allocation of the scarce battery-making materials to reduce our carbon footprint (forgetting for one blissful moment how we've jettisoned carbon concerns in favor of our headling dash for AI). The engineer responded with a version of the old argument that it's fallacious/delusional to think that individual action can make a meaningful impact on the world's big problems.

It occurred to me that, yet again, he had escorted me back to the realm of Zeno's paradoxes, specifically, the one which denies the possibility of motion since, to go a certain distance, you first need to go half the distance. To go that half distance, you first need to go half of it, or a quarter distance. To go a quarter, first an eighth. And so on. The infinite logical divisibility of space thus demonstrates the impossibility of motion. And so (it occurs to me), we are all Oblomovs.

Indeed, why try anything? It just doesn't matter. That's the logical conclusion from this mindset.

Unless, perhaps, one acts as part of a team, a group, a corporation.