Reading about wicked problems for a proposal I am working on has been both fascinating and unsettling.
What makes these problems difficult is not only their scale, but the way every attempted solution seems to generate new questions and new complications. They resist closure.
That realisation pushes me toward a more humble view of research. Trying to understand complex issues from only one disciplinary position, or in isolation, quickly begins to feel insufficient.
If these problems are genuinely entangled, then understanding them requires moving across fields, accepting uncertainty, and learning from approaches beyond one’s original training.
That is part of what keeps research alive for me: the sense that there is always more to learn, and that meaningful work often begins where disciplinary comfort ends.