What do we want? [insert here]

What Do We Want?

(…) erm…

When Do We Want It?

(…) ah…

There is a familiar chant that echoes through protests and movements across decades and continents:

What do we want?

When do we want it?

It is usually followed by clarity and urgency. A demand, crisply stated. A timeline, emphatically agreed.

What feels striking about this moment is not the absence of anger or energy, but the absence of shared answers. Many people sense that something is wrong, deeply and structurally wrong, yet struggle to agree on what, precisely, needs to change, why it needs to change, or what should come next.

The chant is still there. The blanks are not.

By almost every historical measure, large parts of humanity have never been wealthier, healthier, or more educated. Life expectancy has risen. Extreme poverty has fallen. Technology has expanded access to knowledge and connection at a scale previously unimaginable. And yet, across much of the Western world in particular, there is a pervasive sense of unease, anxiety about the future, anger at institutions, distrust of expertise, and a gnawing feeling that the systems we rely on are no longer working as promised.

This dissonance is hard to ignore. If things are objectively “better”, why do they feel so fragile?

One possible answer is that our collective success rests on foundations we know, instinctively if not always explicitly, to be finite. Economic growth has been powered by cheap energy, extractive practices, environmental degradation, and global inequalities that concentrate benefit while dispersing cost. Capitalism, as it has been practised, depends on scarcity, competition, and the existence of winners and losers. It delivers remarkable innovation and wealth, but not without consequences, and not without exclusions.

We know this. Or at least, we sense it.

We know that the ladder many societies have climbed cannot simply be extended, unchanged, to everyone else. We know that perpetual growth on a finite planet is a contradiction. We know that systems built on inequality will eventually generate instability. And yet knowing something and acting on it are very different things.

Perhaps this is where the unease comes from, the widening gap between what we understand and what we are willing, or able, to do.

Rather than facing that gap directly, much of our political and cultural energy is diverted elsewhere. We argue about symbols instead of structures. We fight culture wars because they are simpler than system redesign. We personalise problems that are systemic, moralise choices that are constrained, and search for villains where there are often only incentives.

And when the future feels too uncertain, we turn backwards.

“Make X great again” is not really a plan, it is a refusal. A rejection of the uncomfortable truth that there may be no stable version of the past to return to, and no painless path forward. Nostalgia becomes a shelter from complexity, a promise that if we could just rewind far enough, the contradictions would dissolve.

But they won’t. They didn’t.

This is not, I think, because people are uniquely selfish, short sighted, or incapable of solidarity. It may be something sadder and more structural than that. We have built systems in which loss is punished harshly, where falling is frightening, and where giving something up, status, comfort, certainty, feels like a personal risk rather than a shared transition. In such conditions, self interest is not a moral failing so much as a rational response.

The real problem may be that we lack shared language for trade offs. We are extraordinarily bad at talking honestly about what must shrink, what must change, and who bears the cost, and when. We are even worse at imagining futures that are different without being dystopian.

So we circle the problem instead. We chant without filling in the blanks.

What do we want?

Change, perhaps, but change to what?

When do we want it?

Immediately, but without disruption, without loss, without cost.

That is not a criticism so much as a description of where we are.

If there is a way forward, it does not begin with answers, manifestos, or perfect solutions. It begins with discussion, uncomfortable, unresolved, and conducted in good faith. It begins with admitting limits, naming trade offs, and resisting the pull of comforting nostalgia. It begins with designing systems that reduce fear rather than amplify it.

Because the longer we avoid these conversations, the narrower the options become. Delay is not neutral, it is a choice, and it quietly locks in outcomes that few would consciously select.

We may not yet know what to put in the blanks. But we do know this, we cannot keep chanting around them. If we want a future that is fairer, more stable, and more humane, we need to start talking seriously about how we get there. Not later. Not when it is easier. Now.