how do we actually solve problems?

and are people to blame?

I’ve been pretty quiet since pivoting this newsletter toward philosophy and politics. Not because I ran out of opinions, that’s never been the problem. If anything, I had too many. Every time something happened in the world, I’d feel that itch to write, open my notes app, start a draft… and then stop halfway through. Because I could already see where it was going. Another confident explanation. Another moral argument. Another take that felt sharp in the moment and completely useless a week later.

It wasn’t writer’s block. It was bullshit detection.

I wasn’t struggling to find things to say. I was struggling to find explanations that didn’t immediately collapse the second you actually sat with them.

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The Pattern You Start Seeing Once You Pay Attention

After a while, you start noticing the pattern.

Something goes wrong. Everyone agrees it’s bad. We immediately jump to whose fault it is. One group blames another. Someone proposes a fix. The fix doesn’t work. Everyone gets louder, more certain, more moral. Rinse and repeat. Politics, economics, social media, institutions, culture. Different topic, exact same script.

Same arguments.
Same emotional beats.
Same outcomes.

And here’s the part that started bothering me. This cycle doesn’t just fail to solve problems. It actively makes them harder to solve. It burns energy on the wrong layer. It trains people to fight each other instead of understanding the structure they’re trapped inside. It turns everything into a moral performance and nothing into a diagnosis.

At some point, you have to ask a question that feels uncomfortable precisely because it threatens your favorite explanations.

What if the reason nothing changes isn’t that people are stupid, evil, or hopeless… what if we’re actually looking at the wrong thing?

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“But That’s Just Human Nature,” Right?

For a long time, I assumed the unit of failure was people.

Bad leaders. Corrupt corporations. Greedy elites. Irrational voters. Radical activists. Pick your villain depending on your politics, your mood, and what corner of the internet you’re currently doomscrolling. And look, individuals matter. I’m not pretending humans don’t have agency. That’s not the move.

But here’s the thing that finally broke that explanation for me.

We act like society is frozen, but it isn’t. We’re constantly swapping people in and out. CEOs come and go. Politicians get elected, voted out, replaced, disgraced, redeemed. Movements rise, fracture, rebrand, and get replaced by new movements that swear they’ve learned the lesson this time.

And somehow… nothing fundamental changes.

This is usually where someone says, “Yeah, but that’s just human nature.”

Greed. Power. Self-interest. The idea that none of this is worth analyzing because people will always ruin things anyway. It sounds realistic. Cynical in a way that passes for wisdom. And it conveniently ends the conversation.

The problem is, it doesn’t actually match what we see in the real world.

Look at Scandinavia. High-trust societies. High taxes. Strong social safety nets. Low corruption. People generally follow rules even when enforcement is light. “Human nature” there looks cooperative, future-oriented, and frankly kind of boring.

Now look at failed states or post-collapse economies. Same species, same biology, and suddenly “human nature” looks like hoarding, black markets, violence, and short-term survival at all costs. Not because people changed, but because the environment did.

Or look at work culture. Put people in small teams where effort is visible, incentives are clear, and feedback is immediate, and you get ownership and collaboration. Put those same people in massive bureaucracies with opaque incentives and no real accountability, and “human nature” turns into box-checking, blame-shifting, and career preservation.

Same humans. Completely different behavior.

That’s not greed versus goodness. That’s adaptation.

Humans aren’t defined by a single moral trait. They’re defined by their ability to adapt to the structure they’re placed inside. They learn what’s rewarded. They learn what’s punished. They learn what keeps them safe, respected, employed, and socially intact. Then they shape themselves around that reality. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re trying to survive and, if possible, flourish.

So when we keep swapping people and getting the same results, calling it “human nature” isn’t realism.

It’s giving up on analysis.

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So If It’s Not People… Then What Is It?

So if we can’t chalk this up to human nature, then what gives? What are we actually supposed to look at if blaming people doesn’t explain anything?

The uncomfortable answer is that you have to shift your attention away from individuals and toward something much harder to see. You have to look at the system itself. The structure people are operating inside. The rules, incentives, constraints, and feedback loops that quietly shape behavior over time.

Here’s a simpler way to think about it.

Imagine you’re driving a car that keeps pulling hard to the right. Your first instinct might be to blame the driver. So you swap drivers. Same problem. You swap again. Same problem. At some point, continuing to blame the person behind the wheel stops making sense. It’s not “driver nature” causing the car to drift. It’s the alignment. It’s the vehicle. It’s the system they’re participating in.

The car isn’t evil. The driver isn’t malicious. The system is just set up in a way that produces a very predictable outcome.

And once you see that, the question changes. You stop asking who’s failing, and you start asking what about this setup makes failure the default. Why does it keep pulling in the same direction, regardless of who’s in control? What forces are acting on it that no amount of effort or good intentions can override?

If the same outcomes keep showing up no matter who’s holding the wheel, then the problem probably isn’t personal failure.

It’s the system they’re driving.

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You’ve Seen This Before (You Just Didn’t Call It That)

Once you see this at a big scale, you start seeing it everywhere.

Think about productivity for a second. How many smart, motivated people do you know who feel constantly busy and somehow never feel like they’re making progress? They read the books. They download the apps. They wake up early. They try harder. And the result is usually burnout, guilt, and a growing sense that something is wrong with them.

But most of the time, the issue isn’t motivation. It’s the setup. A system that rewards visible busyness over actual progress. That punishes rest. That confuses motion with direction. Put almost anyone inside that structure and you’ll get the same outcome, no matter how disciplined they are.

And this is the pivot.

When the same pattern keeps showing up across different people, the move stops being “try harder” or “find better people.” The move is to stop interrogating the individual and start interrogating the system they’re operating inside.

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Systems Don’t Need Bad Intentions to Cause Damage

A system, at its simplest, is just a set of rules, incentives, and constraints that shape behavior over time. And the most important thing to understand about systems is this: they don’t need bad intentions to produce bad outcomes.

Put mostly normal people inside a structure that rewards certain behaviors and punishes others, and you’ll get very predictable results. Not because people suddenly become villains, but because people adapt. They do what works. They avoid what hurts. They learn the game, even when they hate the game.

Once that clicks, a lot of things stop being mysterious. Why good people keep doing things they openly criticize. Why reforms feel cosmetic. Why outrage cycles endlessly without actually changing much. Why power keeps concentrating no matter who’s in charge.

None of that requires a conspiracy.

It just requires incentives.

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Maybe It’s Not “Broken”… Maybe It’s Working Exactly As Designed

This is why calling everything “broken” started to feel wrong to me.

We say capitalism is broken. Politics are broken. Media is broken. Education is broken. And sure, a lot of this stuff feels miserable to live inside right now. But if a system keeps producing the same outcomes across decades, administrations, reforms, and cultural moods, it’s not broken in the mechanical sense.

It’s doing what its structure allows.

That doesn’t mean it’s good. It means calling it “broken” lets us avoid the hard part. The part where you ask what the system is actually optimized to do, who benefits from that optimization, who pays the cost, and what feedback is being blocked, delayed, or quietly ignored.

Those aren’t moral questions.

They’re structural ones.

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What I’ve Been Working On Instead of Posting Hot Takes

This is why I went quiet.

I didn’t want to just add more takes to an already deafening room. I’ve been working in the background on a way of thinking about systems that keeps me from lying to myself about what’s actually happening. Not an ideology. Not a left vs right framework. Not a moral scorecard that tells you who’s good and who’s evil.

It’s closer to a discipline. A habit of asking questions that don’t fall apart after five minutes. A way of taking intent seriously without being hypnotized by it. Of starting with outcomes instead of stories. Of treating incentives, power, and feedback as the main event, not a footnote.

Something that works whether you’re talking about a brain, a workplace, a platform, or an entire civilization that thinks it’s permanent.

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What This Newsletter Is Actually Going to Do

So that’s what this newsletter is becoming.

We’re going to investigate systems, some current, some historical. We’ll look at what they claim they’re for, what they actually produce, where they’re stable, where they drift, what leads to collapse, and what allows adaptation instead of breakdown. Capitalism. Social platforms. Political structures. Cultural norms. Past civilizations that thought they were special, inevitable, and permanent… until they weren’t.

But just as important, we’re going to learn how to do this kind of analysis together. Not so you agree with my conclusions. So you’re no longer stuck choosing between blaming someone and giving up. So you can look at a system that’s failing and ask better questions than “who’s evil?” or “what should we tear down next?”

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Why I Think This Actually Matters

I don’t think the world gets fixed by arguing harder. I think it gets fixed by getting honest about the structures we’re living inside, and the constraints we can’t wish away. This newsletter is a long-term investigation of that idea, in public. An attempt to understand why systems keep producing the results they do, and what it would actually take for them to produce different ones.

If nothing else, my hope is that reading this makes the world feel a little less insane. Fewer fake arguments. Less moral whiplash. A clearer sense of when a problem is personal, when it’s systemic, and when yelling at each other is just feeding the machine.

That’s why I’m focusing on systems.

And now that I finally have a way to talk about them without bullshitting myself…

We can actually start.