I don't know when it started, but at some point, all I ever talk about is wanting to create generational companies. I either want to work at one, create one, or invest in one. That means I need clear definitions and qualifications. That's what we're doing today — a deep dive into the first component of what makes a generational company.
Before that, a quick intro: what comprises a generational company? Three things. A generational company does these for decades:
- They solve generational problems. This one is hard. (In this post, we'll dive into what qualifies a problem as "generational.")
- They execute exceptionally.
- They keep reinventing themselves (to keep doing #1 and #2 because problem changes shape and the bar for "exceptional execution" rises)
This post focuses on #1 — which I'd argue is the most important. If you pick the wrong problem, #2 and #3 genuinely don't matter.
Why now? Why think about any of this?
Because it's too easy to drift. Because "AI will do it" is not a plan. Because people still matter — deeply — and our job is to aim talent and capital at work that moves humanity forward, not sideways. And because writing this forces me to say what I believe and own the risk of being wrong in public (which can be humiliating — but it's fine — we all need a little spice in life).
So — what is a generational problem?
Step 1: Definition of a Generational Problem
A generational problem has the following components:
- Scale & universality. It can affect hundreds of millions (ideally billions) of people. It's cross-demographic and not constrained to a niche; it persists across geographies, classes, and cultures. Classic domains that meet this bar include energy, healthcare, education, communication, and finance.
- Multi-decade relevance. The problem has existed for decades and is likely to remain relevant for decades more. This is distinct from temporary inefficiencies and tied to structural forces. Examples include the need for clean water, the rising demand for healthspan, and productivity growth. Most real problems scale with one variable: people. We need tight definitions to test that a problem truly endures.
- Structural transformation potential. Solving it rewires an industry or whole market; it doesn't just help one or two teams. It makes people think differently about how to interact with the world or solve a category of problems, and it enables other innovations to exist or scale. Examples here include paradigm shifts like the internet, AI platforms, or renewable energy.
- Moral & civilizational weight. It tackles issues at the core of human flourishing—safety, dignity, equity, creativity, purpose, and survival. Yes, I'm writing from a human perspective; that lens is the point.
- Asymmetric difficulty & opportunity. It requires breakthroughs in technology, distribution, or organizational models. Once solved, it unlocks compounding returns for decades. Things like quantum computing for materials science, nuclear fusion, AGI safety — they fit in this bucket.
If a problem clears four or five, it's worth building your life around. If not, it might still be good work — just not civilization-changing.
Step 2: How to Qualify a Problem as "Generational"
Scale & Universality
Look for problems billions face or that underpin global-scale industries. These often seem basic or obvious: energy, communication, health, money, knowledge.
- Diagnostic questions: How many people or businesses are affected today? Is this problem relevant across geographies, classes, and demographics? Does solving it improve the lives or productivity of hundreds of millions or more?
- Answers you should be looking for: "Every business, from SMB to Fortune 500, struggles with this." "Billions of people will eventually need this solution, regardless of country."
Endurance & Persistence
Solving enduring problems creates long-term stability and progress. Civilization moves forward only when solutions last longer than one technological or political cycle.
- Diagnostic Questions: Has this problem existed for decades already? If solved once, does it stay solved, or do new versions emerge? Will it still be urgent in 20–50 years?
- Answers you should be looking for: "Humans will always need better ways to generate, store, and use energy." "Access to healthcare has been a problem for centuries and will remain so."
Structural Transformation Potential
Societies leap forward when bottlenecks in systems are broken (electricity, the internet, vaccines). Transformational problems create new layers of civilization.
- Diagnostic Questions: If solved, does this redefine how industries operate? Does it enable new business models or entirely new categories of innovation? Would the economy look fundamentally different afterward?
- Answers you should be looking for: "The internet didn't just improve communication — it created whole new sectors." "AI platforms will reorganize knowledge work itself."
Moral & Civilizational Weight
These are do-or-die problems: energy, health, truth, survival. Without progress, humanity risks decline, inequality, or collapse.
- Diagnostic Questions: If we don't solve this, what happens to society in 50 years? Does this problem touch on survival, equity, or dignity at a civilizational level?
- Answers you should be looking for: "Without addressing climate change, parts of Earth become uninhabitable." "If we don't solve information trust, democracy collapses."
Asymmetric Difficulty & Opportunity
Humanity advances when we solve hard problems that unlock decades of compounding benefits. True generational problems often have a "cold start" difficulty that deters most entrants.
- Diagnostic Questions: Why hasn't this been solved yet? Does solving this require new technology, business models, or distribution channels? Once solved, does it unlock enduring advantages?
- Answers you should be looking for: "It requires fundamental breakthroughs in energy storage, but once achieved, it changes everything." "The upfront investment is massive, but the compounding effects are enormous."
Step 3: How to solve a Generational Problem? What does good solving even look like?
We toss around "forward" a lot — move civilization forward, move intelligence forward, move equity forward. In a vacuum, "forward" is meaningless. Forward to where? On what scale? Toward what target?
In my opinion, "forward" is progress in the conditions for human flourishing and survival. It's not just GDP growth or tech advancement — it's about creating a world where:
- Humans can survive and thrive safely for centuries
- We expand our capabilities — individually, collectively, and technologically
- We increase dignity, equity, and agency, so more people can participate in that thriving
- We preserve optionality for future generations, rather than closing off possibilities.
Simple Equation: Forward = More Survival + More Thriving + More Freedom to FlourishTo keep this grounded, here are established frameworks used to measure how a civilization is doing:
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow)
Maslow's model (1943, later refined) stacks human needs from physiological and safety through belonging and esteem to self-actualization, sometimes ending with self-transcendence. A flourishing civilization is one in which more people spend more of their lives on the upper rungs (creativity, meaning) instead of fighting for survival.
Physiological → Safety → Love/Belonging → Esteem → Self-Actualization → Self-transcendenceKardashev Scale (Energy-Based Civilization Scale)
Kardashev (1964) proposed ranking civilizations by usable energy: Type I harnesses all planetary energy, Type II captures a star's output, Type III taps a galaxy. Earth is still below Type I (~0.73 today).
Human Development Index (HDI, United Nations)
HDI combines life expectancy, education, and income per capita into a 0–1 score. It moves beyond GDP to track the basics of human development and the capacity to choose a life one values.
OECD Better Life Index (BLI)
The BLI is a multidimensional well-being dashboard across eleven domains — housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety, and work-life balance. It paints how people actually live, not just what they earn.
Planetary Boundaries Framework (Stockholm Resilience Center)
Nine Earth-system guardrails: climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone, atmospheric aerosol loading, and novel entities. Overshooting these raises the risk of systemic ecological collapse.
The Great Filter & Existential Risk (Nick Bostrom, etc.)
The Great Filter is the idea that somewhere on the path from simple life to galaxy-spanning civilization lies a hard barrier — in policy terms, a portfolio of existential risks (nuclear war, engineered pandemics, unaligned AI, runaway climate) that could permanently curtail humanity's potential.
Gross National Happiness (GNH, Bhutan)
GNH centers well-being over output across nine domains: psychological well-being, health, education, time use, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience, and living standards. It reweights the scoreboard toward meaning, connection, and culture, not just production.
By combining all these frameworks, you create what I call the Civilization Flourishment Index (CFI), composed of 5 components. The goal of progress is to move all five axes upward simultaneously in ways that are durable, scalable, and transformational.
Civilization Flourishment Index (CFI)
Axis 1: Survival & Resilience
Definition: Humanity's ability to avoid existential risks and build long-term resilience.
Measures: Climate stability, nuclear safety, biosecurity, AI alignment, planetary sustainability, multi-planet presence.
Scale: 1 = Civilization constantly at risk of collapse. 10 = Humanity is multi-planetary, existential risks near zero.
Axis 2: Health & Longevity
Definition: Humans living long, healthy, flourishing lives.
Measures: Life expectancy, healthspan, disease burden, mental health.
Scale: 1 = Life expectancy ~30 years, high infant mortality. 10 = Indefinite healthy lifespan, diseases largely eliminated.
Axis 3: Knowledge & Capability
Definition: Humanity's capacity to understand, create, and control its environment.
Measures: Energy capture, education access, scientific output, computational/AI capability, space exploration.
Scale: 1 = Illiteracy, no science, subsistence living. 10 = Type II Kardashev, near-complete mastery of physics/biology.
Axis 4: Equity and Dignity
Definition: The fairness of access to opportunity, rights, and flourishing.
Measures: Poverty rates, inequality (Gini coefficient), access to education/finance/health, human rights.
Scale: 1 = Extreme inequality, majority in poverty/slavery. 10 = Universal access to dignity, opportunity, and self-determination.
Axis 5: Creativity & Meaning
Definition: The extent to which humans can transcend survival/productivity and express creativity, art, exploration, and meaning.
Measures: Leisure time, cultural output, research not tied to survival, space for art/philosophy/spirituality.
Scale: 1 = All human effort goes to survival. 10 = Widespread flourishing of creativity and meaning, survival needs fully handled.
So when you ask "is this a generational problem?", the meta-question becomes: Does solving this problem move humanity forward on the survival–thriving–freedom scale, and does it do so at a civilizational scale?
Humanity Today (2025, Approximate CFI)
If you compress the dashboard to a snapshot, today looks roughly like this:
- Survival & Resilience: 3/10 (climate crisis, AI risk, fragile geopolitics).
- Health & Longevity: 6/10 (life expectancy ~73 years, but chronic disease dominates).
- Knowledge & Capability: 7/10 (AI breakthroughs, internet, space exploration).
- Equity & Dignity: 4/10 (extreme inequality, billions without basic access).
- Creativity & Meaning: 5/10 (more freedom than ever, but unevenly distributed).
Composite CFI ≈ 5.0/10 → Humanity is midway: past primitive survival, but far from flourishing sustainably.
We are not doing too well on Survival & Resilience: 2024 was the warmest year on record, averaging above 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels; six of nine planetary boundaries are transgressed; the global nuclear stockpile is growing again; the world is only beginning to coordinate on AI risk. On Health & Longevity, life expectancy has roughly doubled in a century (~73 years globally), but non-communicable diseases account for ~75% of non-pandemic deaths, and mental disorders affect ~1 in 8 people worldwide. Knowledge & Capability is high and rising — renewables hit a record 30% of global electricity, over 5.5B people are online, and AI capability is diffusing rapidly — but we're still far from Type-I energy mastery and universal education. Equity & Dignity remains a stark gap: 2.2 billion people lacked safely managed drinking water as of 2022; ~251 million children and youth remain out of school; ~2.6 billion people remain offline. Creativity & Meaning sits in the middle: unprecedented opportunity to create, unevenly realized.
Add it up, and the median human experience sits around "no longer primitive, not yet flourishing." TLDR: we are no longer cavemen — good job, guys! Now, keep going.
Why does any of this matter to me?
Before I end the post, I would like to go back to this question. Why on earth does any of this matter? Why should one be going around looking for generational problems to solve?
I keep circling the same belief: life is about suffering, and life's purpose is to overcome it.
By now, you can tell I'm high-key writing this for myself. If you're bored, go scroll TikTok. If you're still here, my reasons are simple: in going through suffering and coming out of it, I want to make the world a little better for the next generation. "Better" means maximum experiences, maximum emotions, maximum memories, maximum imagination, and maximum love.
If I can do that, even a little, the next generation inherits a world with more options, more dignity, more room to experience life fully.
I want fewer people to feel irrelevant in the process.
I want my work — my words — to outlast me.
I want to dedicate my existence to problems worthy of a lifetime.