A List of Civilizational Well-Being Topics that I believe we can help make happen better.

You can talk about whatever you want on UpTrust!

And, here is a list of some of the conversations we think have the highest potential for civilizational wellbeing—topics that are currently highly polarized and difficult for our society to make sense of and work with. We believe UpTrust can help make these conversations happen and lead to practical positive outcomes for better futures!

I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts and also see what you think is missing. My apologies on the boring tone—aka the obvious use of AIs to help make this.

Cluster 1. Personal & Cultural Development

Focus: How individuals develop, thrive, and find purpose in a rapidly changing world—and how that personal growth intertwines with collective well-being, cultural evolution, and consciousness shifts.

Meaning & Purpose

• Meaning and purpose—especially in a world with accelerating job automation / emerging AI superintelligence
• Personal adaptation to insane pace of change and informational overload
• Personal development and adult education
  • Polarized examples: hustle culture vs. anti-ambition, “Follow your passion” vs. pure pragmatism, meaning vs. material necessity

Mental Health and Wellbeing

• Relationship with medication & holistic approaches

• Non-standard approaches often dismissed or uncritically embraced (psychedelics, plant medicine, shamanic practices); also legal and cultural issues (appropriated or isolated)

• Integrating indigenous, evidence-based, and postmodern methods; understanding interdependencies of four-quadrant approaches

• Longevity research (Bryan Johnson), framing and relationship to death and dying 

Spiritual/Philosophical Growth

• Traditional wisdom sources, including religion, is often either dismissed entirely or uncritically romanticized
  • Understanding and harnessing / protecting from the influence of egregores (eg: antimemetics)

  • Reality/unreality of morphic resonance, how it works in social systems

    Trans-rational epistemologies (mysticial knowing/unknowing, somatic intelligence & embodiment, dreams, art—including modern archetypes like Marvel movies and cultural phenomenon like Reality TV)

• Ethics and nonduality

  • The nature and role of God and "what's of ultimate concern
• Varieties of nonduality & mystical experience; also related to practice v no practice, drug/plant teachers, etc

• Post-scarcity consciousness, transhumanism debates (enhancement enthusiasm vs. bioconservativism)

• Deep ecological awareness and orienting to Earth as a wholistic living system with a deep-time/big-history view

Power Dynamics and Leadership

• What is good leadership? Who are inspiring global leaders?

• Holding the imperfection of historical exemplars while seeking new paradigms

• Linking personal growth to institutional/societal change (inner work + outer work)

• Evolving collective consciousness: measurement, culture, and “what to do with it”

• What are the ethics of various uses and abuses of power? What are the limits, if any, and how we do we hold accountability? What's the role of community, government, media, social media, religion and spiritual teachers in all of this?

• Cultivating next-level leaders in developing world, not just in USA, etc

Family & Community Structures

• Addressing the breakdown of traditional communities and families

• Balancing preservation vs. adaptation in cultural/family contexts (often polarized between traditionalist and progressive extremes)

• The role of religion, the evolution of religion

Cluster 2. Knowledge, Sensemaking & Governance

Focus: Who we trust and why. How we create, validate, and share knowledge. How we govern ourselves, make decisions, and coordinate at scale.

Truth & Decision-Making

• Including learning from experts and experience, and what’s good about gatekeepers and tastemakers

• Expert advice trapped between technocrat worship and populist rejection

• Research/academic system reform (peer review, reproducibility crises)

• Informing government policy, bridging academia and real-world governance

• Prediction markets and forecasting, including how to use for improving collective decisions in public and private sectors at all scales

Social Media, Information Warfare & Propaganda

• Tracking trust

• Sorting signal from noise in social media

• Understanding algorithmic incentives and echo chambers

• Balancing free speech with preventing disinformation

• Media business models underrepresented in discourse

• Info warfare and propaganda coverage

Epistemology & Values

• Ontological updates: reality as participatory/cocreative

• Automatic/unconscious defenses from materialism

• Trans-rational approaches to knowing (mentioned earlier)

• Values/worldview integration: bridging ideological divides

• Moral realism, ethical alignment, etc

Digital Security & Collective Intelligence

• Cybersecurity, data governance, protecting critical infrastructure

• Split between tech solutionism and traditional processes

• Non-local governance systems (network states, global consciousness) and how they interact with local sovereignty

• Reconciling “Sovereignty and world government” questions, as well as new forms of governance like Holacracy and “Teal” organizations
  
  

Cluster 3. Economic & Physical Infrastructure

Focus: Tangible systems—economics, housing, healthcare, education, energy, emergency preparedness—that shape day-to-day life, and the cultural, policy, and technological frameworks that sustain these systems.

Economic Systems & Markets

• Meaning and purpose in work; personal meaning in an automated world

• Costs, wages, housing costs, making a living

• Current discourse often splits between “everything is fine” vs. “collapse imminent”

• Measuring and addressing economic inequality (meritocracy vs. “system rigged”)

  • Hatred and demonization of the superwealthy, realities of class and upward mobility, etc

• Housing affordability crisis (“bubble” vs. “new normal”)

• Job automation and future of work/UBI

• Market design for public goods

• Innovation funding: “VC solves all” vs. “only public goods matter”

• Digital currency/payment system evolution; cryptocurrency debates (maximalists vs. CBDC control advocates)

• Intergenerational wealth transfer

• Monetary policy and the role of governments & orgs like the IMF

• Global financial flows, tax systems

Personal Finance Culture

• FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) extremists vs. consumer culture

• Balancing spiritual/ethical dimensions of money and work

Healthcare & Education

• Healthcare access and delivery, COVID origins, vaccine debates

• Alternative vs. conventional medicine, universal right vs. market solutions

• Education reform (standardization vs. personalization; religious vs. secular; globally—cultural and developmental questions; role of government, school of choice, charter schools, etc)

• Entrenched incentive landscapes and regulatory hurdles

• The role of AI and technology in education, especially globally

Cities, Infrastructure, & Emergency Response

• Law enforcement reform and justice system design (defund vs. defend, “systemic racism,” crime prevention)

• Building livable cities and homes

• Public transportation design—traffic is horrific and massively polluting; the role autonomous vehicles, etc

• Food sustainability, water security

• Clean, reliable energy: nuclear advocates vs. renewables purists

• Preparing for disasters (supply chain resilience, local emergency systems, pandemic preparedness and various questions on rights and responsibilities, individual v collective)

• Internet and tech that serves people (digital infrastructure, cybersecurity)
  
  

Cluster 4. Global Commons & Long-Term Civilizational Challenges

Focus: Planetary-scale and existential issues: AI risk, climate change, geopolitics, resource depletion, space exploration—let’s ensure civilizational flourishing over the long term.

AI Alignment

• AI Alignment debates: dismissive vs. apocalyptic, government v free-market, so much here

Existential Risks & Technology Governance

• Stopping the next pandemic: surveillance state vs. individual liberty

• Synthetic biology

• Nanotech

• Nuclear war,

• Space weather events, asteroid risks

Climate & Environment

• Climate change: alarmism vs. denial, adaptation vs. mitigation, various solutions and framings, envisioning possibilities and how to get there

• What do with global public goods? Eg: air, oceans, forests; water rights; peace; etc

  • Ocean ecosystem management (acidification, overfishing, pollution, coral reefs)

  • Resource depletion forecasts range from denial to doom

Population & Migration

• Population sustainability discussions, including birth and the role of families and space travel, etc.

• Migration, refugees, and borders, racism

Geopolitics & International Relations

• China (eg: discussions frequently lack nuance)

• Russia/Ukraine (eg: lacks context, extremely drama triangle-y)

• The Middle East (eg: Us vs. them, tribalism, historical of context (and lack), lack of empathy on all sides, sloganism, "if you're not with us you're against us," etc.)

• Role of US Military, “Threat of WWIII”

• Sovereignty vs. world government

  • aforementioned network states, opt-in legal codes, etc

• The rise of terrorism and non-state actors, especially how they coordinate and grow using distributed online systems and attract culturally disaffected

Space Development & Exploration

• Commercialization, space-based resources (asteroid mining, space-based solar)

• Post-scarcity economics and cosmic evolution

• Ethical dimensions of space colonization