So if you asked a hundred people today whether the world is on the right track, how many would say yes? I'm guessing fewer than thirty, and honestly that might be generous.
The data backs that intuition up pretty strongly. The Edelman Trust Barometer, for example, has shown global trust in institutions declining from sixty-five percent in twenty-seventeen to just fifty-two percent in twenty-twenty-four. That's a massive shift in less than a decade. And it's not just a vague feeling—when you drill down, you see specific sectors hit hardest. Trust in government, media, and even NGOs has eroded significantly.
Alright, today's prompt from Daniel is about something that's been rattling around in my head for a while. He's pointing to this phrase that Sir Ronald Cohen, the impact investing pioneer, uses as a kind of messaging hook—that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world today as we know it. And Daniel's observation is that most of us feel this, but we point to different causes. He tends to cite the unaffordability of property as a baseline rupture. Others might point to climate, or technology, or democracy. So let's map this landscape.
This framing gets at something I've been thinking about—the feeling itself is almost universal, but the explanations are fragmented. And that fragmentation might actually be part of the problem. It's like we're all feeling different symptoms of the same underlying illness, but we're arguing about which symptom matters most.
Before we dive in, fun fact—today's episode is powered by Xiaomi MiMo v2 Pro. Anyway, let's get into it. Herman, you've been reading around this topic. When Cohen says there's something fundamentally wrong, what's he actually pointing at?
Cohen comes at it from the world of finance and investment. His core argument is that traditional capitalism—the way we allocate capital, the way we measure success—has created enormous wealth but also enormous externalities. Environmental damage, social inequality, the erosion of public goods. His solution is impact investing, which tries to align financial returns with social and environmental outcomes. But the interesting part for our purposes isn't his solution—it's his diagnosis. He's saying the system itself is generating these negative outcomes as a feature, not a bug. He uses the metaphor of a car with a fundamental design flaw—it might look sleek and go fast, but it's constantly leaking oil and overheating. You can keep patching it, or you can redesign the engine.
Right, and I think that's where the universality of the feeling comes from. It's not that one thing is broken—it's that the whole machine seems to be producing outcomes that most people didn't sign up for. But here's what I find interesting about Daniel's framing. He points to housing specifically as a baseline rupture. Not the most dramatic issue, not the most telegenic, but arguably the most fundamental.
Housing is fascinating because it touches everything. If you can't afford to live somewhere stable, everything downstream suffers—family formation, community investment, career risk-taking, even political engagement. And the numbers are stark. The median home price in the United States was three point five times median income in nineteen-seventy. By twenty-twenty-four, it was seven point three times. That's not a blip. That's a structural transformation of what it means to be a working adult. To put that in perspective, a teacher or a nurse in nineteen-seventy could reasonably aspire to own a modest home in many communities. Today, that same profession often requires a partner's income or significant family help to achieve the same goal.
So you basically need two incomes now to afford what one income could buy in nineteen-seventy, and even that's being generous because the quality of what you're buying has also changed. Smaller lots, longer commutes, less access to good schools. I was talking to a friend in Toronto who pointed out that even with two professional incomes, they're looking at condos an hour outside the city—something their parents, on a single tradesman's income, wouldn't have considered acceptable.
And here's the thing that doesn't get enough attention—this isn't just an American phenomenon. You see similar patterns in the UK, in Canada, in Australia, in Israel where Daniel lives. The specifics differ, but the structural trend is the same. Housing has decoupled from wages in virtually every developed economy. In London, the price-to-income ratio is over twelve. In Sydney, it's around thirteen. These aren't just numbers—they represent a fundamental reordering of life possibilities.
Why though? What's the mechanism?
Several reinforcing factors. Zoning restrictions that limit supply. Financialization of housing as an asset class—treating homes as investments rather than shelter. Low interest rates that inflated asset prices for decades. And arguably, a failure to build enough public or social housing to keep pace with demand. Each of these alone would be manageable. Together, they've created a situation where an entire generation looks at the housing ladder and says, I can't get on the first rung. Take zoning as an example—in many North American cities, over seventy percent of residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes, making it illegal to build duplexes or apartments that could increase density and affordability.
And that creates this really corrosive psychological effect, right? Because housing isn't just a financial asset. It's tied to identity, to stability, to the narrative of progress. If your parents bought a house at twenty-five and you're thirty-five and still renting, that feels like a broken promise. Even if your phone is amazing and you have access to incredible technology, the core life milestones feel out of reach. There's this great line from a sociologist I read—she said we've traded "asset-based security" for "subscription-based uncertainty." You don't own your home, you rent it. You don't own your car, you lease it or use Uber. You don't own your media, you subscribe to Netflix and Spotify. Everything is temporary and contingent.
That's a crucial distinction. The standard rebuttal to this kind of pessimism is, well, look at all the progress we've made. Smartphones, medical advances, lower global poverty. And those things are real. But they don't address the specific ruptures in the social contract that people actually feel in their daily lives. You can have a great phone and still feel like the system is rigged against you. It's like being told you should be happy because the food court has expanded while you're slowly starving.
Okay, so that's housing. Let's talk about the climate angle, because Daniel mentioned it—the idea that for younger generations especially, climate change feels like a betrayal. Like previous generations knew what was happening and chose short-term comfort over long-term stability.
The intergenerational framing is powerful and, I think, largely accurate. The scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change has been clear since the late eighties, early nineties. The Kyoto Protocol was nineteen-ninety-seven. We've had decades of warnings, and the response has been... incremental at best. Emissions have continued to rise. So when a twenty-year-old looks at the data and feels betrayed, that's not irrational. That's a reasonable reading of the evidence. Think about it—someone born in two thousand has lived their entire life under the shadow of climate warnings, watched international conferences produce weak agreements, and seen emissions continue to climb. Their entire conscious experience has been one of known crisis and inadequate response.
But here's where I want to push back a little. The climate betrayal narrative, while emotionally resonant, can also become its own kind of trap. If you define the problem as previous generations stole our future, that's a very different framing than we need to build better energy systems. One is about blame, the other is about solutions. The blame framing can lead to paralysis or nihilism—if the damage is already done and the perpetrators are unrepentant, why bother?
That's fair. And I think both framings coexist, sometimes in the same person. You can feel genuine anger about the failure to act while also working on practical solutions. But the reason the betrayal framing has gained so much traction is that it matches the emotional experience. People don't experience climate change as a policy problem. They experience it as a broken trust. You were supposed to leave the world in decent shape for us, and you didn't. I think of Greta Thunberg's "How dare you" speech—it resonated precisely because it named that feeling of betrayal so directly.
Okay, so we've got housing and climate. Let's add technology to the mix, because this is where the paradox gets really sharp.
The technology paradox is genuinely strange. We were promised that digital tools would democratize information, connect people, reduce friction in every domain. And in some ways they have. But in other ways, the same tools have delivered algorithmic manipulation, attention extraction, social isolation, and a kind of epistemic fragmentation where people can't even agree on basic facts anymore. It's like we built a global nervous system but forgot to install a brain.
It's like we got the connective tissue of the internet but lost the coherence of shared reality. And I think what makes this particularly insidious is that it's hard to point to a single villain. There's no one person who decided to make social media corrosive. It emerged from the interaction of engagement-maximizing algorithms, advertising business models, and human psychology. Take the recommendation algorithms—they're not designed to make us angry or misinformed, they're designed to keep us watching. But it turns out that outrage and conspiracy are highly engaging, so the algorithm learns to serve more of that. The system optimizes for attention, not truth or wellbeing.
And the measurement problem compounds this. GDP is up. Productivity is, depending on how you measure it, up. Unemployment is low. By traditional metrics, things look fine. But those metrics don't capture the psychic cost of constant connectivity, the erosion of deep work, the way that digital platforms have restructured social life around consumption rather than community. We're measuring the speed of the hamster wheel but not whether the hamster is happy or healthy.
What's wild is that we have more ways to communicate than ever and people report feeling lonelier than ever. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. That's not something you'd predict from the technology adoption curve alone. It's a classic case of more connection but less communion. You can have a thousand Facebook friends and no one to call at three AM when you're in crisis.
And this connects to the democracy deficit, which is the fourth major rupture point. Institutional trust has collapsed across Western democracies, and the timeline is revealing. There's a sharp inflection after the two-thousand-eight financial crisis, when banks were bailed out and ordinary people lost their homes. That event, more than almost anything else in recent memory, shattered the idea that institutions work for the public good. But it wasn't just the bailout itself—it was the aftermath. Very few executives faced criminal charges, while millions of families faced foreclosure. The perception that there were two sets of rules—one for the powerful, one for everyone else—became entrenched.
The two-thousand-eight crisis is such an underappreciated rupture point. Because it wasn't just an economic event. It was a moral event. The people who caused the crisis were rewarded, and the people who played by the rules were punished. That's a story that sticks with you. It's like the social immune system got infected—instead of attacking the disease, it started attacking healthy tissue.
Pew Research Center data shows that only twenty-four percent of Americans trust the federal government always or most of the time. That's down from something like seventy-seven percent in nineteen-sixty-four. And this isn't just an American trend. You see similar declines in trust across Europe, in Japan, in South Korea. The pattern is remarkably consistent across different political systems and cultures. What's particularly striking is that trust has declined during a period of relative peace and prosperity in many of these countries—which suggests the causes are structural rather than circumstantial.
So let's step back for a second. We've got four major rupture points—housing, climate, technology, and democracy. Each one is significant on its own. But what's really interesting is how they interact. Because these aren't isolated failures. They compound.
That's the key insight. Housing unaffordability reduces family formation. Reduced family formation weakens community ties. Weak community ties make people more dependent on digital platforms for social connection. Digital platforms fragment shared reality. Fragmented shared reality undermines democratic institutions. Undermined democratic institutions make it harder to pass policies that would address housing or climate. It's a reinforcing loop. It's not a chain of dominoes falling—it's a web where pulling one thread tightens all the others.
A doom spiral, if you will.
I was trying to avoid that phrase, but yes. And the reason this matters is that it explains why the feeling of something being fundamentally wrong is so persistent. It's not that people are irrationally pessimistic. It's that they're picking up on a real pattern—multiple systems failing simultaneously in ways that reinforce each other. When you fix one thing but the others remain broken, the overall system doesn't improve much. It's like trying to bail water from a boat with multiple leaks.
Now, here's where I want to introduce a complication. Because there's a common rebuttal to all of this, which is that things have always been bad and people have always felt like the world was going to hell. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and every generation thinks the next one is doomed.
The nostalgia critique has some validity, but it doesn't hold up against the data. When you look at specific, measurable metrics—housing affordability, institutional trust, climate indicators, social isolation—these aren't subjective impressions. They're measurable deteriorations. The median home price to income ratio isn't nostalgia. The decline in trust isn't nostalgia. The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide isn't nostalgia. You can argue about the significance of these metrics, but you can't argue they're just feelings. The data is there.
So the feeling isn't just vibes. It's grounded in objective reality.
Right. And I think the reason the nostalgia critique is so popular is that it's comforting. If this is just how people always feel, then nothing needs to change. But if these are real structural failures, then we have to actually do something about them. And doing something is hard and expensive and politically risky. It's much easier to say "people have always complained" than to grapple with why this particular set of complaints might be different.
Let's look at comparative cases, because I think this helps illuminate what's universal and what's specific. Japan is an interesting example.
Japan is fascinating because they experienced their own version of this rupture earlier than most Western countries. The asset bubble burst in nineteen-ninety-one, and they entered what's been called the lost decades. But the social consequences went far beyond economics. Japan developed an entire vocabulary for social disconnection—hikikomori for social withdrawal, parasite singles for adults who can't or won't form families, the broader phenomenon of declining birth rates that has now created a genuine demographic crisis. What's remarkable is how economic stagnation became social stagnation—the economic freeze seemed to seep into people's willingness to take risks, form relationships, or imagine different futures.
And what's striking about the Japanese case is that it shows how economic stagnation can create social pathologies that persist long after the economy technically recovers. Japan's GDP per capita is still quite high. But the social fabric has been altered in ways that GDP doesn't capture. You have this phenomenon where people describe feeling "stuck" even when they're materially comfortable—the sense of possibility has evaporated.
Exactly the measurement problem we were talking about. Japan looks fine by conventional metrics. But if you talk to Japanese people, especially younger ones, there's a pervasive sense that the social contract has broken down. Work harder than your parents for less security, fewer opportunities to form families, a shrinking sense of possibility. There's a term—"salaryman"—that used to denote security and status. Now it often denotes exhaustion and diminishing returns.
Now compare that to the Nordic countries, which have tried a different approach.
The Nordic model is interesting because it represents an attempt to preserve social mobility through deliberate policy choices. Heavy investment in public education, strong social safety nets, and critically, housing policies that have kept affordability more manageable than in Anglo-Saxon economies. Sweden, Denmark, Finland—they've all had their challenges, but the baseline social contract has held up better. They've essentially tried to build a buffer against the kind of systemic failures we're describing.
Although even there, you're seeing cracks. The rise of right-wing populism in Sweden and Finland suggests that the social contract is under strain even in the best-case scenarios. It's like even the most robust immune systems can get overwhelmed by new pathogens.
That's a really important point. The Nordic model isn't immune to these pressures. It's just more resilient. Immigration, globalization, technological change—these forces are universal. The question is whether your institutions are strong enough to absorb the shocks without fracturing. And what we're seeing is that even strong institutions have limits when multiple pressures hit simultaneously.
Okay, so let's talk about the narrative layer, because I think this is where things get really messy. Even if we agree that there are real structural problems, the way those problems get narrated and discussed is heavily shaped by social media and media ecosystems.
This is where the fragmentation becomes most visible. Take housing. The left narrative is that greedy landlords and developers are exploiting people. The right narrative is that government regulation and immigration are driving up costs. Both contain elements of truth, but they frame the problem in ways that make common cause almost impossible. And social media algorithms ensure you mostly see the narrative that confirms your existing beliefs, creating separate reality tunnels.
And social media accelerates this fragmentation because it rewards tribal identification. If you're on team housing-is-a-right, you'll get amplified for attacking team housing-is-a-market. The platforms don't care about solving the problem. They care about engagement, and outrage is engaging. It's like we've built a public square where the loudest, most extreme voices get microphones, while the moderate voices get drowned out.
So we end up in a situation where there's broad agreement that something is wrong, but the diagnosis gets captured by competing political tribes, each of which has a vested interest in framing the problem in a way that validates their existing worldview. And the actual systemic nature of the problem—the way these failures reinforce each other—gets lost in the noise. We end up arguing about symptoms while ignoring the disease.
This connects to something I find really interesting about Cohen's framing. He's coming at it from finance, from the investment world, and his answer is to redirect capital. But that's a very specific kind of answer, and it raises the question of whether the problems we're describing can actually be solved by market mechanisms, or whether they require something more fundamental.
Cohen would argue that impact investing is a bridge—that you can't just flip a switch from extractive capitalism to something better, but you can start aligning incentives. And there's evidence that it works in specific cases. Social impact bonds have shown measurable results in reducing recidivism, improving educational outcomes. But the question is whether scaling these mechanisms can address systemic failures or whether they're just treating symptoms. It's like putting better filters on smokestacks versus transforming the entire energy system.
I think there's a deeper question here about whether the feeling of something being fundamentally wrong is actually a precursor to change or just a new form of permanent dissatisfaction. Like, are we in a pre-revolutionary moment where the accumulated failures are about to produce a genuine transformation? Or are we in a permanent state of managed decline where people complain but nothing fundamentally shifts?
I genuinely don't know. Historically, periods of widespread institutional distrust have led to either reform or collapse. The New Deal was a response to the Great Depression. The post-war welfare state was a response to the dislocations of industrialization and war. But those responses required political conditions that don't currently exist—broad consensus about the direction of change, institutional capacity to implement large-scale reforms, and a sense of shared national purpose. Today we have the problems but lack the consensus and, in many cases, the institutional capacity.
And those conditions are precisely what the fragmentation we've been describing has eroded. The tools that might help us solve the problems are the same tools that are contributing to the fragmentation. Social media could theoretically be used to build consensus, but in practice it's used to deepen divisions. It's like trying to use a flame thrower to put out a fire.
So we're in a bit of a bind. The diagnosis is increasingly clear. Multiple systems are failing in ways that reinforce each other. Traditional metrics don't capture the deterioration. Narrative fragmentation makes collective action harder. And the institutional capacity to respond has been hollowed out by decades of declining trust. It's a perfect storm of challenges.
Alright, let's talk about what people can actually do with this understanding, because I don't want this to just be a doom-and-gloom episode. What are the practical takeaways?
First, I think recognizing that your specific grievance is likely part of a larger systemic pattern is genuinely useful. If you're angry about housing costs, understanding that this connects to financialization, zoning policy, and broader economic trends helps you avoid getting captured by a single tribal narrative. You can advocate for specific solutions without buying into an entire political package. It's the difference between seeing one tree and understanding the forest ecosystem.
And I'd add that this understanding also helps with the psychological burden. Part of what makes the feeling of something being fundamentally wrong so exhausting is the sense that it's uniquely your problem, or uniquely your generation's problem. But when you see the pattern—that these are structural failures affecting millions of people in similar ways—it shifts from personal failure to collective challenge. That's not a solution, but it's a more productive starting point. It moves you from shame to solidarity.
Second, focus on local, measurable impact rather than trying to fix the entire system. If housing is your primary concern, get involved in local zoning debates, support organizations that build affordable housing, advocate for policy changes at the municipal level. These are small levers, but they're real levers. And the feedback loop is tighter—you can actually see whether your efforts produce results. There's research showing that local engagement actually increases people's sense of agency more than national political activism.
The local focus is underrated. There's this tendency to think that if you're not solving climate change globally, you're not doing anything. But most of the policies that actually affect people's daily lives—housing, schools, transportation, local governance—happen at a level where individual engagement can make a real difference. It's the difference between yelling at your TV during a national news broadcast and showing up at a city council meeting.
Third, and this is more of a mindset shift—resist the temptation to collapse everything into a single narrative. The world is not broken because of one thing. It's broken because of the interaction of many things. And the solutions, if they come, will be similarly plural. There's no silver bullet. There's a portfolio of interventions across different domains. You have to think like an investor diversifying a portfolio, not a believer following a single doctrine.
Which, interestingly, is kind of what Cohen is arguing for with impact investing. Not one solution, but a different way of thinking about how capital gets allocated across multiple problems simultaneously.
That's a good connection. And it points to something I find genuinely hopeful, which is that the conversation itself is shifting. Ten years ago, impact investing was a niche concept. Now it's a multi-trillion-dollar sector. Ten years ago, the housing affordability crisis was a local issue in a few expensive cities. Now it's a national political issue in multiple countries. The awareness is catching up to the reality. We're finally starting to name the problems accurately, which is always the first step toward solving them.
Whether the action catches up to the awareness is the open question.
It is. And I think that's where we have to be honest about the uncertainty. We can identify the problems with increasing precision. We can even identify promising interventions. But whether the political will exists to implement those interventions at scale—that's a question I can't answer. The gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it remains vast.
Let me throw out one more thought before we wrap up. There's a version of the something-is-fundamentally-wrong feeling that I think is actually healthy. Not the doom-and-gloom version, but the version that says, we can see the problems clearly now, and seeing them clearly is the first step toward addressing them. The alternative—not seeing them, or pretending they don't exist—is worse. This clarity, uncomfortable as it is, is actually a form of progress.
I agree with that framing. The feeling of unease is a signal. It's telling us that the systems we've built aren't producing the outcomes we want. The question is whether we respond to that signal with constructive action or with nihilism and tribal warfare. The signal itself isn't the problem—how we interpret and respond to it is.
And I think the answer probably depends on which rupture point affects you most. If you're a young person locked out of housing, your response will be different from someone whose primary concern is climate, or someone who feels betrayed by technology platforms. The challenge is building coalitions across these different grievances without flattening them into a single story. You have to honor the specificity of each experience while finding the common threads.
Which brings us back to Cohen's point about impact. The reason his framing resonates—there is something fundamentally wrong—is that it names a shared feeling without prescribing a single cause. And in a fragmented media landscape, that kind of open-ended diagnosis might actually be more useful than a specific policy prescription, because it invites people to bring their own understanding of what's broken and work from there. It's a big tent rather than a narrow church.
Alright, let's land this plane. Where do we think this goes over the next decade?
I think we'll see continued institutional strain, but also continued innovation in how people organize outside of traditional institutions. Mutual aid networks, community land trusts, cooperative housing models, local governance experiments—these are all emerging responses to the failures we've been describing. They're small, they're fragmented, but they represent a genuine attempt to rebuild social contracts from the ground up. It's like immune cells forming around an infection when the main system fails.
And I think we'll see the political landscape continue to realign around these issues in unpredictable ways. The old left-right divide doesn't map cleanly onto housing versus climate versus technology. New coalitions are forming, and they don't follow the traditional playbook. You might see environmentalists and housing advocates finding common cause against exclusionary zoning, or tech workers and traditional unions aligning against platform monopolies.
The optimistic read is that we're in a period of creative destruction—old institutions are failing, but new ones are being built. The pessimistic read is that the destruction outpaces the creation, and we end up in a more fragmented, less functional society. The honest answer is probably both, simultaneously, in different places and different domains.
The honest answer is probably both, depending on where you look.
Probably so.
Alright, thanks as always to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. Big thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that power this show. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you're enjoying the show, a quick review on your podcast app helps us reach new listeners. Until next time.
