I think Professor Pagel’s specific attempts to articulate the mechanics of human ideation isn’t the most interesting take-away from this video. His tone makes it clear that he is playing around with a perspective that is new to him, a rough understanding of human intelligence that deserves further exploration.
The concept that I think is important, and which is certainly not universally accepted by a wider audience of reasonably intelligent and educated people, is that our creativity is not “special”. That new ideas aren’t magically willed into being by some ineffable desire to innovate, but are instead arrived at via conscious and subconscious pattern-seeking, and a mental “auditioning” of potential solutions.
And natural selection is a decent conversational analogy here. There are people who accept that there is no external intelligent agency which governs the “creation” of advanced biological organisms, but still hold on to the idea that the human mind is somehow captained by an irreducible agent, that there is a ghost in the machine. Drawing a comparison between these two processes is a strong and accessible argument against such a notion.
This might be a re-phrasing of some of the other comments, but I think you need to calibrate your approach to match your personality make-up. For instance I could easily spend hours reading, thinking, and writing about some socio-political issue, but the idea of joining a march or protest addressing the same issue sounds draining. Other people are the exact opposite of that. Maybe you like traveling, maybe you like telling stories, maybe you like statistics, maybe you like street-art. Any of these could be creatively leveraged to change the world.
If you link your goals to activities that you can’t get enough of, then burn-out is less of a problem. If you decide to equate the worth of your contributions with your degree of success in , because it’s the culturally accepted standard (or even because it’s the most effective tactic, all other things being equal), then you could end up both failing AND blaming yourself for it.