Working in the environmental and sustainability sector has been enlightening and rewarding, but the challenges we face there are a microcosm of the broader systemic complexities we're facing in 2020.

Reflecting on the psychological effects of Covid. The sense of anxiety, depression, dread, the feeling of being stripped of your agency, and of not having control of the domino effect of transformation that has annihilated the reassuring narratives of "normality" that we take for granted. We have built our psychological safety net on mythologies like capitalism and democracy - indeed, they were the triumphant narratives of the 20th century. But these assumptions have been radically called into question this decade, a decade of microchips and digital media and AI. I believe we've reached the tipping point in both capitalism and democracy where we've saturated their potential, and through that, we've witnessed their magnificent shortcomings. The negative externalities of both paradigms, the consequential hackability and capitalistic-driven game theory has resulted in the degradation of our ecosystems, fostered increasingly polarized and antagonistic perspectives, and driven deeper economic inequity. The race to the bottom has led to a dangerously vulnerable interconnectedness - as Covid has laid bare - whilst exploiting the world's most vulnerable in pursuit of shareholder value.

So now, we are experiencing a hard reset. We've shut the world off, and are restarting it. This means we're being forced to rethink, to reorganize our relationship with reality, to craft a new collective narrative, driven by the interrelationship between the environment, its humans, and the exchange between them. This requires a tectonic shift in the philosophy of what a healthy society should look like.

This type of complex challenge, or as Jamie Wheal says - wicked problem - is what I'm inspired by. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest opportunities. So how do we move away from Mad Max, and towards Star Trek? This is the problem I am committed to working on.