Maslows Modern Maladies – Progress worked. So why does modern life still feel misaligned? A systems view on abundance and the future

Futurology often focuses on what we’re building next—AI, automation, biotech, smart cities.
This post is about what happens after systems succeed.

I recently wrote a long essay asking a question that feels increasingly relevant as everything scales faster:

If the world keeps improving by every material metric, why does day-to-day life still feel oddly misaligned?

The argument isn’t that progress failed. It’s that progress worked—sometimes too well.

Human needs evolved under scarcity. To meet those needs at scale, societies built systems that rely on metrics: calories, prices, engagement, reach, net worth. Those metrics make large systems legible and controllable. That’s how we got abundance.

But when scale exceeds human and social limits, the metric starts replacing the need it was meant to represent.

A few examples from the essay, framed for future systems:

• Food: As food became ambient and always available, hunger stopped resetting. The feedback loop never closes. Knowledge doesn’t fix it because the system never pauses long enough for recalibration.
• Housing: Financialized housing works as a capital allocator—but because housing is spatially fixed while opportunity is mobile, it increasingly traps people instead of stabilizing them.
• Belonging: When information explodes and feeds personalize, shared reality becomes statistically improbable. Conversation now requires translation, while cheap dopamine substitutes for social reward.
• Esteem: At small scale, reputation accumulated through observation. At civilizational scale, that didn’t work—so we compressed esteem into metrics. Necessary for coordination, corrosive to authenticity.
• Meaning: Money emerged to solve barter and coordination problems. Its universality made it the language of value—and eventually a proxy for worth itself.

The forward-looking question isn’t “how do we go back?”
It’s: How do we design future systems—especially AI-driven ones—so that optimization doesn’t quietly invert the human needs they’re supposed to serve?

The heuristic I ended with (and the reason I’m posting here):

That question applies just as much to AI alignment, recommender systems, digital governance, and future economies as it does to food or housing.

Full essay here if you’re interested:
👉 https://open.substack.com/pub/dandaanish/p/maslows-modern-maladies?r=4f49l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Genuinely curious how people here think about this in the context of future tech.
Where do you see the next “metric replacing the need” failure mode emerging?