THE same question keeps coming up: why don’t you write about the solutions? Let me give two answers here.

The first answer is that, in all honesty, the kind with hand on heart, nobody is really interested in solutions in Pakistan. They all just want to hear what they believe to be true. If you don’t tell them what they want to hear, they tune out. To some extent, this is the result of an algorithmically generated reality that more and more people are living in. Algorithms are very keenly tuned to what the user wants to see, hear, read or who the user wishes to interact with. They then serve this up and the user grows increasingly accustomed to receiving processed thoughts in easily digestible form that most closely approximate the user’s own preferences.

My experience is that when you tell people things they don’t want to hear, they either tune out, start arguing, interrupt with a stream-of-consciousness-style monologue of their own diagnosis and solutions or, especially seen among the young on social media, react viscerally, usually with hate, abuse, mockery and derision. This is the cognitive impairment of an algorithmically conditioned mind. People are losing the ability to engage with views different from their own.

Helpfully though, there are still enough people who don’t suffer from this syndrome that a meaningful conversation can be carried out. To those people I say my second thing: what problem are you trying to solve?

Whenever talking about solutions, it is critical to first have clarity on the problem, because the obvious question is, ‘solution to what?’ When it comes to the economy, for example, are we asking for a solution to the economy’s

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