Is it just me or doesn't it seem like the economic system running our society places more value on the existence of a problem than its solution? Pharma prioritizes treatments over cures, forever wars that we are told are meant to deal with the bad guys in a few days or weeks but they end up dragging on for years with the bad guys more emboldened than ever afterward, charities and NGOs that exist to raise money towards a cause they want to fix but ironically the more "interventions" they do the bigger the problem gets and even the degrading quality of products across the board (i.e. planned obsolescence) to encourage their replacement with new ones often. To put it in another way, humanity has become extremely good at optimizing individual parts of a system while becoming increasingly incapable or lazy to determine whether the system is optimizing for the right things. We measure economic growth but without asking the deeper question of what exactly is growing.

What happens when the incentives of a civilization reward the persistence of problems more reliably than their disappearance? Once that happens, the suck stops being an accident. It becomes the new modus operandi and ultimately, an asset.

A healthy society should want fewer problems and invests in solving them but our economy thrives on their persistence, where the ideal customer is no longer someone with a problem to be solved; but it's the person whose problem has been converted into a recurring revenue stream. Thanks to the subscription business model, we no longer own things but we merely rent access to them from a big tech platform, that occupies a permanent seat between us and the things we need/want. Basically being held hostage at gunpoint as ownership slowly gets eroded. There is something deeply anti-human about this. Perhaps a sane civilization would therefore be less obsessed with creating more problems to monetize and more concerned with creating conditions in which fewer problems need to be monetized in the first place. An economic systems in which the ultimate measure of success is not how much activity we can generate, but how much unnecessary suffering we can eliminate. Civilization should not be a machine for converting human weakness into revenue but a framework for human beings to flourish.

We cannot keep building a world in which every inconvenience becomes an industry and every unsolved problem becomes an opportunity for perpetual extraction. At some point, we have to ask the forbidden question; what if the goal isn't to monetize suck? What if the goal is to make less of it? Food for thought.