If you are reading this, you are considering building a brand new road! First, congratulations! Building a new road is a serious undertaking and you probably don't even know where to start. That's okay! This instructional will walk you through your first "roadie" considerations.

Do "You" Want To Build This Road?

Friends pressure us into things sometimes. Are you considering building a road because you want to or because your friend wants to? It's good to go along with friends—this is how we build community—but a passionless road is hardly a road at all. Grab a sheet of paper and record your responses to these survey questions to discover if you really want to build this road.

Visionariness

Visionariness, or the visionary magnitude measure, helps you understand how much you can see this road in your future. Visionariness (the visionary magnitude measure) can be judged through introspection by the experienced road builder, but you, the reader of this guide, are not yet experienced. In lieu of pure introspection, use the following Visionariness survey to get your visionary magnitude measure (a.k.a. Visionariness) and write the point score for the statement you relate to most on your sheet of paper that you should already have in your hand or on your desk.

(5 points) I think about this road every day. I may even dream about this road if I am not distracted with other things. The idea that this road may one day exist fills me with hope, a hope I should not ignore.
(4 points) I have thought about this road before. I can't say that I love the idea of this road, but I definitely have thought about it.
(3 points) I am not too sure what a road is. I mean, I know a road when I see it, but like, what is a road?
(1 point) I do not like this road idea.

Be honest and write down your point score on your sheet of paper, then move on to the next section.

Raw Inspiration

Da Vinci died at 67. This is actually longer than a modern highway is anticipated to last, which is unexpected.

(5 points) Aha! I feel that I can build this road myself. I just need the resources. And if no resources are available, I will collect them.
(4 points) Roads!
(3 points) I must do something—anything—to leave my mark on the world.
(1 point) I do not like action.

Tendency Towards Movement

If Da Vinci is inspired, Newton has moves. Consider his law, "An object that is at rest will tend to stay at rest. An object that is in motion will tend to stay in motion." Roads bring a certain municipal movement feng shui to the function that does not mesh well with those at rest. So,

(5 points) I tend to stay in motion.
(0 points) I tend to stay at rest.

Survey Results

If you honestly completed this survey, go ahead and give yourself (1 point) more. Due to the size roads need to be, they are typically very honest. Contrast this with a spring.

Score 7 or higher - Congratulations! You personally want to build a road.
Score 6 or lower - Unfortunately, your heart doesn't seem to be in it this time.

If you passed this survey, continue on to the next sections, where we discuss some of the more practical road-building considerations.

What Happens If You Don't Build It?

It is difficult to make the society-scale judgments required for making a road go/no-go (or "roadie") call. The simplest question to open up with is, "What would happen if I don't build this road?"

People depend on roads to get to their jobs, to take their children to school, to go to the coffee shop and to run into the cute barista again, after you accidentally said "you too" when she said "Enjoy your coffee," but you realized that—in a way—that is actually an okay response and you wanted to bring up your previous blunder again today to see if she thought about it in the same way that you did because it might mean that you two think similarly to one another and maybe there could be something more outside of just the barista-patron dynamic. If this road isn't built, do you lose that? Does someone else lose that? Fertility in the United States is at an all-time low.

Growing city populations and social decay via unchecked immigration lead to increased road congestion, and we need someone strong to blow our national nose. Building a road is a societal Sudafed—absent something more... final.

If not building the road leads to any of these outcomes, build it. If you are still unsure, we can model the road on the Socioeconomic Pareto Frontier.

The Socioeconomic Action Space and Its Pareto Frontier

Bitcoin has seen a 25,640,925% return since 2010. I don't like roads that much. The time and money you would spend constructing this road can be spent elsewhere, and this elsewhere might have better returns—financially, socially, or both. Consider the following:

On a time+cash normalized basis, the expected socioeconomic returns frontier might be described by the black-colored arc here, with two outliers: Fartcoin and the great unknown. If you can do a crypto rug, do it. For the rest of us, we need to consider the great unknown. Is there something that has greater social impact than building a road for equal or greater financial returns? Is there something with greater financial returns that has an equal social impact? Print out this graph and label where some of your daily activities might fall. Does anything push the frontier? So long as you normalize 1 unit on the social good axis to equal 1 unit on the financial returns axis, you should only ever choose to do something along this frontier.

If building a road is on or pushing this frontier for you, build the road!

Please understand that we must exclude Fartcoin from the frontier because the returns are simply too great.

Would Your Dear Mother Like This Road?

Counterfactuals are hard. Novel graphing methods are harder. Thinking of your mother is easy. Remember the times when you were just a suckling brat without the capacity for complex thought. Her warmth as she holds you. The disappointment in her eyes when you said you were taking a gap year. The lack of disappointment when you said you were taking the second.

Does your mother want you to build this road?

I'm so, so sorry, Mom. I don't know why I keep doing this. I just feel so sad sometimes. I feel so tired. I find it so hard to keep going. How and why did you keep going?

Does your mother want you to build this road?

Forgiveness is a gift to the forgiver, not the forgiven. Forgive yourself. Forgive your past self.

Does your mother want you to build this road?

This project is great. Infrastructure changes lives. Two thousand years ago, you would have been the most powerful man in your village. Build this road to redeem yourself in her eyes.

Will she see the redemption of her son in this road? She will if you give it your all.

So, You Want To Build a Road

So, you want to build a road, and you want it to be good. You can only do good work if the work is good. So use the above metrics and considerations to figure out if you should really build this road. And remember,

the road is just a metaphor.