The Inner Monologue

Ask almost anyone today if they want change and they’ll say yes. The young want the world to be fairer. The old want it to be simpler. The poor want opportunity; the rich want stability. Every movement, every rally, every viral slogan rides on that same longing — the demand that things be different. But if you pause and ask the next question — different how? — the silence that follows says everything.

People want change. They just don’t know what they want to change into.

The Language of Longing

The word change is a linguistic escape hatch. It carries the emotional charge of dissatisfaction without the responsibility of vision. When we chant for change, we aren’t drafting blueprints; we’re venting pain. The phrase is a placeholder for frustration, a way to signal that we’re unhappy without having to articulate what happiness would actually require.

This vagueness is comforting. The minute we define what we want, we must defend it. We must justify why our version of “better” is worth more than someone else’s version. It’s easier to stay in the warm ambiguity of progress — that shimmering promise that things will improve, somehow, someday, if only someone would make it so.

But change without direction is just motion. A revolution without a destination is a centrifuge — it spins faster and faster, and eventually flings everyone outward.

The Empty Promise of Miracles

Imagine a thought experiment: a miracle occurs overnight, and by morning the world is exactly as you wish it to be. What does it look like?

Most people can’t describe it. They hesitate, then reach for adjectives: peaceful, fair, free, safe. But these are not destinations. They are moods. And moods can’t be legislated, engineered, or sustained without form.

This inability to imagine specifics is not a moral failure; it’s a psychological truth. Human beings are wired to identify threats far more easily than solutions. Evolution favored those who could see the tiger in the grass, not those who could design a better savannah. Our brains are tuned for vigilance, not vision.

The result is that entire societies can agree on what they despise yet remain paralyzed when asked what they desire. That’s why “tear it down” movements ignite like wildfire, while “build it better” initiatives sputter and die in committee.

Revolutions That Lose the Map

History offers a grim litany of this pattern. The French Revolution overthrew monarchy only to enthrone terror. The Bolsheviks promised equality and delivered bureaucracy. The Arab Spring toppled dictators but left power vacuums that new strongmen eagerly filled. The pattern repeats because the same force that fuels revolution — righteous anger — is also what blinds it to the complexity of reconstruction.

Rage is an accelerant. It burns fast and hot, but it doesn’t illuminate the road ahead. When the old order collapses, the new one must be imagined — and imagination, it turns out, is rarer than outrage.

Movements that begin in moral clarity often end in moral confusion. The people who knew exactly what they were against find themselves leading a world they never paused to design.

The Addiction to Momentum

We live in an age of perpetual dissatisfaction. The news cycle rewards outrage, social media amplifies grievances, and algorithms serve us the daily reminder that someone, somewhere, has something we lack. In this environment, wanting change becomes a lifestyle.

But constant wanting dulls the sense of direction. When we crave novelty more than improvement, we mistake disruption for progress. A society addicted to momentum begins to dismantle even what works, mistaking motion for meaning.

The tech world worships this ethos — move fast and break things. But when that becomes a civic creed, you get politics that feel like startups: overfunded with emotion, underwritten by thought, forever pivoting toward the next shiny outrage.

The Comfort of Chaos

There’s another reason people don’t define what they want: clarity ends the drama. If we ever reached the world we dream of, what would we fight for? Who would we blame? What would fill our days once the enemy is gone?

For many, the struggle is the identity. Activists, pundits, politicians, even ordinary citizens on social media — we draw meaning from the battle itself. The war against injustice, corruption, greed, ignorance — it gives shape to our days. A resolved world would leave a terrifying silence.

So unconsciously, we keep the fight alive. We demand change, but we secretly need the problem to persist. We don’t want to lose our purpose.

The Crisis of Imagination

Real change — not performative, not cyclical, but structural — demands imagination. And imagination is scarce. It requires stepping beyond grievance and envisioning systems that haven’t existed before. It demands empathy with those who disagree, patience with ambiguity, and the humility to accept that perfection will never arrive.

But imagination doesn’t trend. Anger does. Anger is instant and contagious; imagination is slow and solitary. Anger unites the masses; imagination isolates the visionary. That’s why the latter rarely leads the former.

The Path Forward

If we are to escape this loop, we need a new civic habit: to ask not only what’s wrong, but what would right look like? Not just what must end, but what should begin?

This doesn’t mean utopia. It means detail. Policy, design, tradeoffs, accountability — the unglamorous architecture of improvement. If we can’t describe the world we want in specifics, we’ll keep waking up in the world we have, only angrier about it.

The real miracle isn’t the world suddenly becoming better.
The real miracle is people finally knowing what better means — and being brave enough to build it.