- Make it so that people in your community have access to clean water. Surprisingly, it's a problem even in the most advanced countries.
- Contribute to something in healthcare that reduces costs, improves availability, or makes more people survive a procedure, an illness, etc.
- Make firefighting safer, or more efficient. Make it less needed in the first place.
- Make the air clearer. Make the energy cheaper. Make the roads better and safer. Etc.
- (Meta) make the market less ennui-generating.
I found that "what pays" is not a good proxy, because often what pays best is solving problems for a group of people, which also generate further problems for other groups of people. Usually, the benefits for the first group are purely financial.
To use a simple example - advertising. There's lots of people who would pay you for your work in this space, because your work will earn them more money. What your work will do downstream, however, is most likely one of those:
- It'll create more work for someone else to cancel the effects of your work; a lot of advertising is playing a zero-sum game, i.e. simply wasting natural resources and human time. (Conversely, often your work is only needed to cancel out the effect of someone else's efforts.)
- It'll disturb the market, promoting a worse solution over a better solution, leading customers to make wrong choices, and thus lose some amount of money and/or happiness.
- It'll add to the noise we all have to endure, also slowly eroding happiness.
Occasionally, you might end up promoting the right thing to the right crowd for the right reasons, but I doubt that happens very often ;).
Conversely to all of that, I feel that solving what I see as "social problems" pays less, if at all, again making "what pays" a bad proxy towards finding ways to address those problems.
