I Don't Believe in "Solutions." I Believe in Engagement.
Wanting the "correct" result is meaningless.
When I present criticism, some angry person inevitably tells me I’m a contrarian because I don’t “present solutions.” I don’t tell people what to buy, what person or policy to vote for, or what mindset will fix everything.
What they’re really mad about is that I don’t wrap things up with a bow. They’re right—but they’re coming from the wrong place.
“Solutions” imply closure. Finality. That there is a stable end state if you just do the right thing. People want a strategy guide as if this is a video game; which dialogue choices and actions do we take to get the “Good Ending?” But we live in an unstable system—socially, economically, emotionally—and it thrives on selling the fantasy that resolution is just one purchase, one mindset shift, one “platform” away.
The internet—and more specifically, the rise of fandom as the dominant American social ideology—has made this worse. Every opinion becomes a “take,” every problem demands “accountability,” and every conversation has to end with a solution—one you can buy, or at least buy into.
And when that solution inevitably fails, the problem is never with the framework. It’s always that we “picked the wrong solution.” Or worse: that the person who offered it “turned out to be bad.” The ending sucked, so the fandom turns on the writers. Again.
Solutions
What people usually mean by “solution” is a kind of narrative shortcut. A way to feel like the work is done. Not just progress, but progress with closure—like a movie ending where the music swells, the credits roll, and everything makes sense. It’s not just about fixing a problem—it’s about moving past it, preferably with some sense of moral superiority. The right words, the right steps, the right people in charge. A better brand. A better vote. A better way to talk about your trauma. It’s comforting. It’s marketable.
But it’s not how life works—and it’s definitely not how systemic problems work.
We don’t live in a world where contradictions are magically supplied when we find the right solution and make demand for it known. But contradictions do resolve—just not neatly. Resolution, when it happens, is called history. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles—not Reddit arguments, viral infographics, or self-optimization schemes.
Every social system carries a primary contradiction (the one that creates classes and thus the one that designates rulers). Under capitalism, that contradiction is ultimately between use-value and exchange-value—what I’ve framed as the “value crisis.” That crisis expresses itself in endless ways: mass precarity, overproduction, declining rates of profit, etc. And yes, it will resolve. But how it resolves is not a matter of branding or vibes. It may be violent revolution. It may be cooperative transformation. Both have happened before and both will happen again.
The model of presenting solutions and marketing them is ultimately one aimed at garnering institutional support. And the reason “solutions” get institutional support is that they aren’t aimed at resolving contradictions. They’re aimed at managing them—temporarily, aesthetically, or personally. In fact, “solutions” are usually just newer, shinier contradictions with better messaging (the point of my book, Woke Ouroboros: Segregation and Essentialism).
And when they fall apart—when the thing we thought would change everything doesn’t, or when the person we trusted “gets exposed”—we don’t question the logic of specifically seeking closure. We just look for another solution.
This is the utopian impulse: “There’s a destination we’re trying to reach, and if we just get the right plan or the right people, we’ll get there.”
But there is no there; “solutions” are the language of utopia.
They imply a final state, a resolved contradiction, a way to escape the struggle by thinking the right thoughts or voting the right way.
Dystopia is exactly the same thing with different aesthetics.
Father John Misty
Father John Misty is a brilliant musician. His work is beautiful and emotionally searing. He has critiques that I see as very adjacent to my own in songs of his like Total Entertainment Forever.
But at the end of the day, it often lands in the same place as the people he critiques—certainty. Where others promise heaven, he promises hell. Either way, the conversation is over.
I love his most recent song, Mental Health. It’s one of Misty’s sharpest critiques—and one of the best examples of why I both love and take issue with his work. He nails the performance of identity, the commodification of therapy, the way we internalize systems of control and call it self-discovery.
“Your true self / Oh, they'd love if you could find it / Makes you much less hard work to predict.”
That line is searing. It exposes how even the pursuit of “authenticity” can be instrumentalized—turned into something legible, manageable, safe. In a culture obsessed with self-knowledge, the end goal isn’t liberation—it’s predictability.
But then, he turns inward:
“No one knows you like yourself / You two should speak / In the presence of a licensee.”
It’s a clever, cynical take on therapy. And yes, therapy is commodified and captured by market logic—it can be implemented in a way that causes harm.
But the implication here is potentially broader and something I heavily disagree with—a near-total rejection of the therapeutic framework. Not just a critique of its limitations, but of its existence. And ultimately, a third party trained to listen, reflect, and help someone engage with their own behavior is useful and valuable.
Misty then further leans into resignation:
“This hallucination / The Cathedral in the prison / Where the dreams of the citizens / Can only tell you what is wrong with them.”
This is a deeper attack on the therapeutic frame. Dreams—our most private, irrational selves—aren’t just captured. They’re pathologized. And again, he’s not wrong—but this isn’t inherent to the concept of therapy. It’s a failure of its implementation, not its potential.
Understanding every line as building on the context of previous lines, the song paints therapy not as a potential tool for growth or reflection, but as a kind of soft carceral architecture—your dreams exist to prove that something’s wrong with you. The “cathedral” is reverent, even beautiful, but its function is containment. You’re not encouraged to imagine something new—you’re encouraged to disclose, self-report, “confess.” The most sacred ritual is naming your dysfunction. The dream doesn’t liberate you. It logs your symptoms.
In that framing, the highest form of participation is admitting something is wrong with you—and calling that progress. But that’s only the beginning of what serious mental health treatment—or fellowship—can actually be. Step one is admitting one has a problem… and there is more than one step.
Misty doesn’t really see it that way, though, closing the loop here:
“The one regret that's really pretty tough / Is knowing I didn’t go nearly far enough.”
And that’s the closure: a full surrender. Despair is the destination. He turns the negative outcome into a foregone conclusion and then invites us to romanticize it. That might be honest feeling, but it’s still a type of utopianism—albeit as dystopia. It doesn’t challenge us to engage with the contradiction. It just wraps it in grandeur and calls it done.
And that’s the trick. Every “solution” is a performance of certainty. Every “no future” is too.
They’re two sides of the same utopian coin—one shining with hope, the other tarnished with despair. But both offer the same false promise: that the contradiction has already been resolved. That the answer is known, and you either buy in or opt out.
Whether you’re being sold a lifestyle, a policy platform, or a poetic collapse, the logic is the same. Closure. Finality. The end of questioning.
But that’s not how anything real works.
Contradictions aren’t resolved by rhetoric or attitude. They move. They grind. They transform. They produce conflict, but that isn’t a moral good or bad; it’s simply reality. We can’t know how to fix the problems of today until we do know, and when we do know, they get fixed. We don’t get there by declaring an outcome, we get there by engaging.
Engagement
So, what does it mean to believe in engagement?
First, it needs to be said: I am not talking about a social metric. Yes, “engagement” is a primary feature of social platforms, but that’s the commodification of a reductive version of what I’m saying here.
I have been telling you that certainty is a misstep, so perhaps the best way to describe what I am advocating for is refusing to skip to the end. We should be taking things seriously without having to wrap them in a lesson.
And that doesn’t look noble or cinematic. It looks like listening to someone you disagree with without trying to beat them. It looks like pushing through your own instinct to self-protect with irony or ideology. It means sitting with the discomfort of being implicated as “unproductive” or “contrarian”—and still choosing to participate.
Engagement isn’t automatically satisfying. It may never reward you. You don’t get applause for showing up. You get more questions. More contradictions. More responsibility.
And maybe that’s why people rush to solutions, collapse, or moral performance. Engagement doesn’t give you the endorphin hit of being right. It asks you to stay in the thing before it resolves—and maybe after it doesn’t.
This is the part where people love to misread me. “Oh, so you’re saying do nothing? So you want THE RIGHT to win!? That’s REACTIONARY!!!” No. I’m saying stop pretending you can predict the future.
Engagement isn’t passivity; it’s the oppsite. It’s the refusal to substitute performance for contact. It’s not giving up—it’s giving up the illusion that someone already has the answer. That if you just buy the right product, vote for the right policy, adopt the right identity, or follow the right account, everything will be resolved. It’s not winning; it’s the process of moving forward.
Engagement doesn’t go viral, but it’s how history moves.
Conclusion
Rejecting “solutions” doesn’t mean rejecting the idea of solving anything. I’m not telling you to be a directionless, irresponsible, purely biological actor. I think it’s important to take a different kind of responsibility than the one every “very special episode” has told us to—one rooted in presence instead of projected result.
The world doesn't need another “vision” of how to feel good about injustice because your ideology advocates for an outcome that puts you above it. It doesn’t need more heroes or villains or consumer-safe utopias (or catharsis about how “we live in a hell world”). It doesn’t need one more answer pretending to be the answer.
What it needs is people willing to talk, to listen, and even to contradict themselves. To be wrong sometimes and still keep going.
It’s not easy. But over time, it will resolve more than any “solution” ever will. Not because it offers closure, but because it stays with the world, instead of standing above it.
I think this is one of my favourite articles of yours I've read so far. I should work on this, I should figure out how to stick around and help things even when it's not gratifying or flashy