[Essay] Uncomfortable Questions in Unstable Times

A Reflection Guide to the Future

This essay is adapted from the Frankly published on February 13th, 2026 titled, “Uncomfortable Questions in Unstable Times.”

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Einstein once wrote: “The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution.” This is especially true today because we live in a time where we can easily generate answers on demand, pull up confident takes in seconds, and even outsource the voice of certainty from machines. But what we need to navigate the future will not be found in today’s confident answers – rather we will be guided by what we choose to ask and what we choose to notice.

Every month or two going forward I want to do a small installment called Uncomfortable Questions in Unstable Times. These will be 7-10 prompts about our civilizational trajectory. I doubt we’ll have the “answers” to these questions, but they’re also not meant to be rhetorical. My hope is that they will be discussable: with friends, over a walk, or over dinner. If you are alone, it might be with a notebook – and some self-reflection and honesty.

This series gets at the heart of my shifting theory of change. I don’t think the main impact of The Great Simplification platform is going to be from the information conveyed in our content, though that is a helpful step in widening the conversation and speaking the same language.

I think what will really create change is the two-way flow of ideas, emergence, and unknown response from the global TGS community (the central hub of which is through our Hylo channel). We’re midwifing a conversation about the future.

In the future, I hope these uncomfortable questions can be discussed in more organized groups of people who are fluent in the wide-boundary system story and want to get to work in their communities, regions, watersheds, and parts of the world.

For today, I’ll give a short lead-in for each topic and then a clean question. No debate and no grand conclusions. No Lord of the Rings quotes…at least not today. Just some deep – and at times uncomfortable – questions surrounding the more-than-human predicament, because I think better questions are a form of preparedness.

To use a mid-winter Minnesota comparison, these questions are like looking at the brake lights 2-3 cars ahead of you in a snowstorm instead of the ones right in front of you.

Stability Versus Growth

For most of our lives, the default setting of our society has been growth and expansion. It has been fully implied and rarely questioned for the most part. More throughput, more complexity, more connectivity, more stuff – more everything. Growth isn’t even a policy preference, it’s just been understood as the operating system of the world.

But what happens when binding constraints shift the reality (or even the perception of reality) from “How much will we grow?” to “Can we remain stable?” This applies to supply chains, grids, food, trust, governance, and the like. If the implicit goal of a society changes, lots of identities and ideologies are going to get scrambled. We’ll need to figure out what is necessary for survival, coping, and well-being.

Question(s): If society in your country quietly pivoted from “growth” to “stability” as the primary goal, what impacts would this have on your own life and plans? What would you want society to protect first, and what would you be willing to let go?

The Suffering Gradient

In stable times, people forget how thin the membrane is between “normal” life and fear-based life. When systems strain, you often see a gradient: those with buffers stay calm, while those without buffers experience the future first. It’s not because they are weaker, just because they are closer to the edge.

Suffering is not evenly distributed now, even when causes are systemic. It will be even less evenly distributed in the future, which raises an uncomfortable moral question.

Question(s): What are your responsibilities toward people who are experiencing the future earlier than you are? And, in a wider boundary sense, toward ecosystems and other species?

The Meaning Problem

A lot of people think our crisis is primarily technical: energy, climate, and economics. But there is another layer. Many lives have become comfortable but not meaningful. Hyper-connected but also quite lonely. Entertained (most of the time) but restless. As meaning and purpose erode, fertile ground opens for addiction, scapegoating, and authoritarian impulses to sprout. Meaning is actually a stabilizer for society, not just some luxury add-on.

Question: If you had to design your life to generate meaning, what would you change first?

Dark Triad: Nation Size

A couple months ago, I did a Frankly titled The Influence of Psychopaths: Why Humans Are Better Than We Think following a conversation with Reid Meloy and Nancy McWilliams about psychopathy and the dark triad (Dark Triad Personality Traits: How Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism Impact Our Cultures & Social Systems). In that Frankly, I tried to articulate something that increasingly feels true and important to me: humans, individually and in small groups, are often better than what humanity looks like in aggregate. This isn’t because individuals are saints, but because scale itself changes the incentives of our inherited and conserved ancestral tribal behaviors.

When you move from a village to a nation, you don’t just get a larger population, you also get new social systems that reward visibility, certainty, conflict, and winning. This system begets a selection effect where a small number of unusually forceful and strategic-minded personalities can steer the signal far more than their numbers should allow. Subsequently, the average gets pulled far away from the median behavior. I unpacked this dynamic in more detail in my recent Frankly, Humanity as Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde: The Symptoms, Patterns, and Drivers.

Lately, I have been wondering whether that same pattern is showing up at the level of countries. The United States is one obvious test case. China would be another, but I also think this could apply to many places.

Many people outside of my country, the United States, are watching and quietly asking whether the U.S. can still function as a coherent, trustworthy member of the international community. Inside my country, the spectrum of beliefs about what the U.S. is and where it’s headed is enormous – and that spread tends to follow political identity more than shared facts.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: if you take the “median versus mean” idea seriously, then a lot of the damage is not caused by “most” people. It’s caused by incentive gradients and feedback loops. This raises a question that isn’t about blame, but about responsibility. Even if we did not create the incentives, we still live inside them, and our choices today either reinforce these loops or dampen them.

Question(s): If a country is judged by its loudest outputs, what responsibility do ordinary citizens have for the signal their nation sends to the world, and where does that responsibility end? If the next era is less about expansion and more about stability, what should the U.S. try to be known for?

The AI Bifurcation

In my opinion, all of the previous questions are underpinned by the growing influence of artificial intelligence – which is why the last three questions in this essay are about AI.

Back in December, I did a Frankly called The Quadruple Bifurcation, where I outlined some of the ways the human population is splitting in their lived realities. There’s a simple bifurcation present with AI between people who become genuinely fluent with the tools and people who only use them superficially (or not at all). I think this is unfolding in real time and is going to matter more than many of us think.

Relatedly, I suspect AI is going to keep losing the public approval contest on both political sides, but especially on the left. Less because people are confused about what it can do, and more because of its effect on work, truth, and art – and how it changes the texture of everyday life.

But the public mood won’t stop the buildout of these tools. Data centers, chips, and model training have physical appetites of electricity, water, land, and grid upgrades. In a tighter economic environment, those inputs will stop feeling abstract and start showing up as higher utility bills, higher rates, more local fights over data center sites, and a general sense that some big monster is being fed in the background of peoples’ daily lives.

It combines to form something potentially volatile in 2026 and beyond: a technology that is increasingly unpopular yet still expanding, and a public that may start to connect AI expansion with real household costs – even if the story is messy and hard to cleanly attribute.

Question(s): What happens when a technology that many people resent becomes financially supported by the general population via higher household bills? In a world of tighter energy and water, what is the ethical rule for allocating scarce resources to AI versus households and essential services?

An AI Winter

It’s possible, and in my opinion likely, that we get an “AI winter” in the next couple years. This wouldn’t be a total collapse of AI’s capability, it would be a reset of hype and valuations surrounding AI, because the physical world is unable to scale as fast as the financial story. Chips, data centers, grid upgrades, copper, water, and a handful of hard-to-scale inputs like tantalum, lanthanum, and other critical resources become physical bottlenecks. If that reset comes, it might be one of the last chances to shape rules, norms, and infrastructure before the next surge.

Question: If we get an AI winter, what should we do during that pause to improve the long-run outcome, and what speed bumps would you put in place before the next boom?

Purity Versus Effectiveness

There’s a pattern that shows up when large-scale technology and large-scale human societies intersect: a new tool arrives. The tool is often powerful and messy, and it creates both real upside and real harm as it starts to reorganize the environment around it.

Very quickly, we then do what humans always do – we sort into moral identities with respect to the tool, whether it comes in the form of fossil fuels, the internet, or now AI. We create purity tests and form tribes around refusing the tool or embracing it, treating the choice as a signal of personal identity.

I think AI is going to be that kind of object, but on steroids. Like it or hate it, it is a new axis of polarization. But there is a serious wider-boundary issue underneath, and it’s the part that makes me increasingly uncomfortable and worried.

Throughout history, the actors most committed to accumulation, control, and winning will use whatever tools are available. They will use them early and relentlessly, which means restraint can become a strange kind of disadvantage. Said differently, the ethical choice can also start to look like the less effective one.

More broadly, the coordination problem arises. If a large number of people who care about livable futures decide to not use the strongest coordination tools, the important question becomes whether they can still communicate, organize, and be effective in a rapidly shifting world, which has the highest stakes between Power and the Web of Life.

Question(s): Where is the line between integrity and self-disarmament? When Power uses every tool, what is the ethical duty of those trying to protect life: abstain, or learn to wield, or learn to wield with constraint (or another hidden option)? What are the rules of engagement for using powerful tools without becoming what you oppose?

Conclusion

I encourage you to think about and discuss some of these questions, whether that be in a small circle, a large gathering, or by yourself. Even if these don’t spur any immediate action now, they will help us and our communities start to ‘look two or three cars ahead’ with respect to how we want to respond to a coming simplification. This is why I think questions are important, and I plan to be asking a lot more this year.

Much more to say next week, I hope you’re all well. Thanks for reading.

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