Things Right in Front of Us
There’s a certain kind of optimism that can only be earned the hard way. It doesn’t arrive in a TED Talk or a quarterly plan; it arrives when we admit that we are living through a season of unraveling and choose to build anyway. This is about what we are calling good problems to have…the kind of problems that show up only after we’ve done the nearby work that strengthens our hands and clears our sight.
Horizon problems are real and worthy, questions about large-scale governance, post-scarcity economics, new forms of finance, AI alignment, and planetary commons. 
But if we reach for those while skipping what’s right in front of us, we will simply recreate the old world with better branding. Let’s stay close to the ground: the traumas we must face, the mindsets we must retire, the cultural reflexes we must unlearn, and the small, honest practices that can carry new life forward. Once that work is underway, we need to build bridges between the old and new.Only then can we really focus on making progress towards a new horizon. Good problems are not solved by bigger plans; they are earned by better presence.
The Pollution of the Past: Trauma & Healing
Here is the part we usually skip because it feels too tender: systems pass trauma along. Patriarchy, colonialism, racism, sexism, and financial inequity are not just policy failures; they are psychological wounds, they live in bodies and get transmitted through everyday norms; whose voices count, whose pain is ignored; who is “professional,” who is disposable; who is protected, whose boundaries get violated. When we build a “new” system without metabolizing this history in ourselves, we carry it forward: we hide conflict, we avoid the hard conversation, we optimize for optics, we bid for status disguised as service. We design for control because we don’t trust one another. We preach community while hoarding decision rights. We call it strategy; it’s really fear.
As within, so without is more than a slogan, it’s the first step of public work as a private witness: how does my body respond under stress? Do I freeze and appease? Do I fight and dominate? Do I dissociate and disappear? Nothing “out there” will fix what we refuse to feel “in here.” Inner work is not a detour; it is the shortest road to personal sovereignty and trustworthy relationships. We cannot meaningfully steward commons if we are covertly reenacting unprocessed grief, entitlement, or shame.
This isn’t a demand for perfection. It’s a call to honest practice:
Trying to solve horizon problems, new financing models or regional governance, from unhealed trauma is like pouring clean water into a dirty cup. You can’t drink clarity from it. The cup must be rinsed, often, together. This is the paradox of scale: healing is local and slow, but it’s also the only way anything healthy reproduces.
Underneath this is being comfortable with not knowing. We rush to fix because we can’t tolerate uncertainty or ambiguity; we write monolithic plans to avoid feeling small. Living System Design asks for a different posture: stay in contact with reality long enough to learn from it. The more we can remain present through uncertainty, the less we will need to control people to quiet our own fear.
Retiring the Old Map: New Mindsets
Let’s acknowledge a gentle but sobering premise: our map is wrong. We’ve been trained to mistake the financial system for the economy, as if money were the point of life rather than a tool for coordinating care. Economy, from oikos (home) and nomos (management), is meant to be the art of tending our shared house. But we built our house on a scoreboard, profit, it rewards what corrodes the foundation. With that confusion, we elevate extraction over stewardship, legibility over relationships, “scale” over sufficiency, and growth over health. The result is a feedback loop generating anxiety, depression and depletion: organizations under constant pressure to prove worth through metrics that say nothing about whether needs are reliably met, whether trust is rising, whether the ecosystem is healing.
Living System Design builds with a different brick: if we want a livable future, we must build social systems more like ecosystems, regenerative, sufficient, emergent, and interconnected. It treats values as attractors (what pulls us in) and principles as guardrails (how we stay within limits when under stress). Contributionism is the new economic posture: rooted in needs that put people and planet before profit, measures success by how well the system recovers, learns, and continues to meet needs. Its working grammar is simple and non-utopian:
Before we chase horizon problems, we need to make this foundation non-negotiable: alignment around values, principles, and contribution, repeatable actions that make life more livable. If we skip this, if we try to “win the future” using the same extractive muscle memory, we’ll reinforce the very fragilities we hope to end.
A simple lesson from the night the lights didn’t go out, those communities that have microgrids, neighbor phone trees, shared fridges, or an extra propane tank don’t need heroics; they need trust and relationship. It’s not outsourced preparedness; it’s an insourced community. This is the new mindset in one sentence: the most reliable source of security is relationships organized around real needs.
American Narcissism: The Subtle Sell-Out
There’s an unnamed American tone we’ve all absorbed: What’s in it for me? We’ve built a culture where nearly every act of service is passed through a brand engine, where offerings are re-skinned as “products”, reinforced using memes “regenerative” delivered through an “app” and community becomes the “funnel.” Good work gets bent by a logic of optics and returns: Pitch it. Package it. Prove it. Scale it. Somewhere along the way, the question “What does the world actually need here?” is replaced by “How do I get attention, validation, and funding?”
This is not a character indictment; it’s a system diagnosis. When the scoreboard is money, power and status, it is rational to curate a public self that attracts them. But a movement cannot be built on a thousand curated selves auditioning for one another. Contributionism inverts the lens: is the thing needed, then tells a story to widen the circle, not the other way around. If the story comes first, the work warps to fit a narrative arc that sells. If contribution comes first, the story becomes instructions anyone can use.
Before we tackle horizon problems, we have to practice non-performative service: where requests are clear, contributions are visible, credit is communal, and stories are shared as blueprints rather than on social media billboards. ROI is no longer “Return on Investment” it becomes “Return on Impact.” Asking “What’s the system’s recovery time?”, “Whose life has improved?”, “What commons got stronger?”, “What harm got repaired?”
The uncomfortable experiment is to let some good work go undocumented at first, de-glamorizing service and rebuilding the muscle of listening for need without the compensatory hit of applause. We’re not abolishing recognition; we’re rehabilitating it so that status attaches to reliability, repair, and stewardship, not self-promotion.
Where We Are: Next Steps
The “bardo” is a place Buddhists refer to as the place between death and birth. This is the place we as a human society are facing when we talk about shifting from a capital based economy to one based on needs. With this recognition it is important to address the needs of this time. From the lens of Living System Design it is hospicing the old and midwifing the new.The work now is transition, learning to live in the “bardo” between worlds and bootstrapping, entering just enough from the old to start the new operating system. That means building what’s next while we still earn, vote, heal, parent, and care inside what is.
Living In The Bardo: Transition
Seeding The New: Bootstrapping
When we understand we are living in these transitional times, the question becomes how do we move forward. Through the lens of Living System Design, we compost. By transferring the assets, capital, land, resources and people, we create the new organizational, legal and financial structures imbued with the Contributionism mindset.
New Horizons: What Will Arise
It is premature to tackle horizon questions like skills versus need, trust and technology, power and bureaucracy, money, debt, and value until we’ve earned them through near work. Consider these four examples:
In other words, right-in-front-of-us work gives us the only reliable data we’ll ever get: what actually helps, where people actually show up, how conflict actually moves, which incentives actually cultivate dignity, and how much structure is actually needed before it becomes a cage.
Staying With What’s Near
“Good problems to have” will meet us on the road if we take the next faithful step. We will get to questions about regional federations, contribution-indexed currencies, post-industrial land trusts, and AI tools that extend, not replace, human stewardship. We will get to new legal forms for cooperations that manage shared assets, to micro-bonds that finance commons, to accountability protocols that travel across networks. But first, we attend to the near work that makes the horizon reachable:
If you’re tempted to sprint ahead, pause. Ask whether that impulse is wisdom or escape. Ask whether the next big idea is a way to avoid the next small conversation. Ask whether your plan would still make sense if no one applauded. The future we want is not waiting at the end of a pitch deck; it is hiding inside the boring, beautiful work of becoming reliable to one another. Build the ethos, trust and relationships to move forward together.
Good problems will find us when we have earned them.