I curate an index of the top teams fixing the big problems we all care about. It’s called the row99. Check it out here.
How a society feels about its future is directly correlated with what it’s willing to do about it. And we’re about to enter humanity’s most consequential decade feeling like shit.
Everyone can list the big problems. Climate, AI safety, housing, the future of democracy. But few consider our collective dread as one of them. In this essay I’ll make the case that it’s the biggest, most slept on challenge humanity faces right now.
Ask what it takes to solve a big problem and you get a familiar list: money, talent, technology, or “political will.”
But there’s a line item missing from that list, likely because it sounds too fluffy and abstract. Hope.
If that reads as mushy or out of touch, stick with me.
In 2018 two social psychologists, Smadar Cohen-Chen and Martijn van Zomeren, ran three experiments on people stuck inside problems that felt unsolvable: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, National Health Service privatization in the UK, and gun reform in the US. They measured two things separately: whether people believed the situation could change at all, and whether they believed their own group could be the ones to change it. The study found that believing “we could do this” only translated into a real willingness to act when people also believed it could be done at all.
There’s a practical reason that hope (mushy as it may sound) belongs on the list alongside capital or talent. Deploying one’s money or career to big societal problems doesn’t just happen naturally. People have to believe the work will amount to something before they write the check or take the leap. When that belief is absent, the money stays put and smart people default to the more certain careers of Big Tech, consulting, you name it.
Climate, AI, and the rest are real threats. No question. But the dread that swallowing much of our modern culture is the actual problem, the thing that decides the extent to which we act upon those threats.
Like any resource, hope has a supply. And this collective dread most of us are either feeling ourselves or watching in other people signals it’s running low. Super low.
And into this general societal malaise, AI has arrived, and it’s made the fear of the future worse. Made a better version of things feel all the more unreachable.
A society that already feels like everything is broken now has to decide, quickly, whether a better future might exist at all. That, friends, is the window we’re in, and we’re walking into it with the tank near empty.
the shape of hope
If hope is a resource, it helps to know what it’s comprised of.
A psychologist named Rick Snyder spent his career on this question, and his work makes hope feel less abstract. Hope is three things working together:
Goals: A clear and specific target
Pathways: Real, workable routes to reach said target
Belief: The motivation and mental energy required to actually do the things required.
Take any one away and the architecture of hope dissolves. Goals and a lot of belief doesn’t do much without real pathways for action. A clear path ripe with belief fails without proper goals. And on and on for each permutation.
The useful move, then, is to hold our moment up against each one and ask where it’s failing.
goals.
Most of us don’t have a clear sense of the direction we want society to go. We can describe in detail what we don’t want the next twenty years to look like, but things get vague when we’re pressed to define what we do want. On the big problems we’ve largely stopped doing the work of getting specific, partly because we’re so busy fighting about the fixes (or the people) that we’ve stopped rallying people around a real vision of what we’re fixing toward.
pathways.
This is the biggest leak. Even where the goal is obvious, a stable climate, say, or an AI transition that doesn’t shred the labor market, few of us can name a route to it. The routes are out there, but they’re held in pieces by people you’ve never heard of, and it’s no one’s job to give you a map that makes this stuff feel tangible and workable. So most are left feeling unqualified to even join the conversation.
belief.
We talk about cynicism and apathy in young people like they’re character flaws, but I think they’re the predictable result of no vision and no path. Belief simply can’t thrive in a system like that.
where the dread comes from
To get a pulse on how young people are feeling I consulted Harvard’s Spring 2026 Youth Poll. It’s a tough read:
13% of people under thirty think the country is on the right track.
26% are hopeful about its future, down from 55% in 2021.
Half agree that “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does,” up 15 points since 2017.
Some of that dread is earned in daily experience. Sky high cost of living, the collapse of shared meaning, and loneliness are things you feel directly. But the problems that scare people most about the future are less likely to be experienced directly. You’re more likely to see it on social media or the news than have your day-to-day actually disrupted by it.
Think about what most people know about climate change. They’ve never looked at a climate model, but they’ve seen a few thousand clips and headlines, and their sense of where it’s headed is the sum total of whatever dropped into their feed. They aren’t reacting the problem, they’re reacting to a picture of it, assembled for them piece by piece by whatever reached their screen. Same for AI. Same for democracy. They treat the feeling they have about a problem as a clean read on reality, when it’s simply a reflection of the picture they’ve been provided.
how reality is edited
This raises the question of who assembles that picture, and what they’re optimizing for. The honest answer is nobody. No single person sits at a desk deciding what your picture of climate looks like. Instead, as well all know, it’s assembled by algorithms and feeds optimized to hold attention.
But let’s look at what that does to these issues specifically. Every challenge society can be understand from the perspective of what is actually broken, and what is being done to fix that break.
The damage shows up in our feeds as news. The problem easily clears the bar and reaches your screen, over and over, for as long as it stays broken. The fixing shows up as… nothing. Why? Fixes have a long time horizon. Labs spending six years on a battery, bills are crafted over months, coalitions built over years. The fixes themselves lack the core properties that get something into your feed. And thus your image of reality is skewed, fundamentally, for the worse. This isn’t conspiracy, the mechanics are clear.
Nobody chooses to leave the fixing out. It just loses the attention battle.
So every big problem in your head arrives with its broken half fully rendered and its fixing half missing, and it stays that way. Put that against Snyder. The picture shows you the goal every day, in the form of everything that’s wrong, and almost never a pathway. It hands you the exact ingredients for dread, on repeat.
Modern life is a dread machine.
what cures it
If dread is a goal with no visible pathway, the cure is putting the pathway back in the picture. The question is who can reliably provide it.
There are humans gaining real ground right now, but we rarely hear about them, whether it’s some founder in Ohio or a state AG stacking wins against Big Tech. We’ll call them Fixers, for ease.
Engaging with Fixers takes us out of imagining pathways and lets us see them for ourselves.
I can attest to this in a massive way. I’ve spent the last several years learning about the people working on the problems I care most about, most of them people I’d never heard of. Reading what they publish, watching their videos, connecting the dots between what one of them is doing and what an adjacent Fixer is doing. It’s hands down the single thing that has changed my relationship to the future. The feed is still as toxic as ever, but it stopped being my only read on where the world was headed.
It’s something of a gateway drug. Once you’ve watched one person go up against a hard problem, you assume there are others, and you go looking, and there they are. On every problem I named there are people making real, measurable progress, passing laws and building the boring infrastructure we need.
What that means for hope is obvious. Hope is the resource we’re short on, and Fixers are the people producing it. Engaging with Fixers does two things at once. They raise the hope supply of everyone watching, because they make the work visible and legible, which makes the goal feel inherently reachable. And amidst all the noise, they show you where the door is, so some of the people watching might walk through it.
Thousands of people are producing the exact resource we’re short on, and the only thing between them and the rest of us is that they’re mostly invisible.
where we go from here
Consider the first line of this piece. How a society feels about its future decides what it’s willing to do about it. The money and the talent are mostly here. What’s missing is the belief that they’d amount to anything, and it’s missing for the reason we laid out: the picture we’re handed shows you what’s broken and almost never who’s actually working the solution. It’s optimized away from it.
Which is the strange thing about the biggest problem we have. It’s the cheapest to fix. Climate needs trillions of dollars and a few decades. Building belief just needs the people already doing the work to be seen.
Think about who’s famous in this country. We can name the athletes, the founders, the actors, the people who are famous for being famous. Fame is how a society tells itself who matters, and it’s the most powerful tool we have for steering attention, and behind attention, talent and money. We live in a culture where the person driving down child mortality is less famous than the person who went viral for falling off a boat.
It’s time we made the Fixers famous. To treat the person gaining ground on a hard problem as the highest-status thing you can be in this society, because it is.
We’ve built an entire industry around making people famous. It’s rarely been aimed here.
A society that can name its Fixers can start to see its own future. Right now we don’t know who they are. That’s the problem, and it’s the biggest one we’ve got.
stay up.
j
I curate a list of the top teams fixing the big problems we all care about. I call it the row99. Check it out here.