I recently watched the film In Time: once people reach the age of 25, they stop aging, but must constantly earn “time” to stay alive. The rich possess hundreds of years, while the poor scramble every day to earn enough life for tomorrow. Many people become outraged by the unfairness of the world at this point, but few continue to ask: Why was this system designed this way? If everyone had unlimited time while the population, resources, and productivity remained limited, the system would likewise be unsustainable. Therefore, every system is essentially a way of managing and distributing scarcity under specific conditions of productivity, resources, and population.

But the real problem is that once a system operates for a long time, it develops vested interests, organizational structures, and path dependence: rules originally created to maintain the system may later become rules for preserving interests; scarcity that was once real may gradually become scarcity manufactured by people. As a result, the old system finds it difficult to carry out thorough reform within its own framework, because by the end, reform often means negating itself.
That is why changes in the world often do not come through the endless optimization of the old system, but through iteration in cycles and recurring patterns: the old system solves the problems of the previous cycle, then creates the problems of the next cycle amid new productivity and environmental conditions. Once contradictions accumulate to a critical point, a new system redefines resources and distribution. Seeing unfairness means seeing only the outcome; seeing the system means beginning to understand the world. What truly matters is determining whether a system is still solving problems, or whether it has itself already become the problem.