Hi, I’m Bobby.
I left medical school in my penultimate year, but I always imagined I would return to healthcare in some form. I just didn’t expect it to happen this way, or this soon.
For a while, I thought returning to healthcare meant returning to hospitals, clinics, patients, prescriptions, and the traditional path I had stepped away from. But over time, I’ve realised that the question pulling me back is bigger than medicine alone.
I’ve recently gone down a rabbit hole: how do we build a better society?
Not just how do we become healthier, richer, more productive, or more optimised as individuals. I mean something bigger than that.
How do we create communities, institutions, technologies, and environments that make it easier for people to live better lives without needing heroic levels of discipline?
I don’t think I’m alone in thinking about this.
There seems to be a new wave of people who genuinely want to do good for society. Some of us grew up with a distrust of institutions, corporations, governments, and even healthcare systems. But instead of turning away from these problems, many people are starting to turn towards them.
There is beauty in tackling hard problems. There is meaning in trying to fix the systems that shape us.
You can see this in the rise of new philanthropic models and public goods funding. Stripe’s Frontier helped create a market for permanent carbon removal. Intercept is now trying to fund ways to reduce or even eliminate respiratory infections. People who have benefited from technology, especially those close to the AI and LLM boom, are beginning to ask what they should do with their capital, talent, and leverage.
Of course, there is a separate debate about whether this is enough. Whether people who accumulate enormous wealth and power should be praised for giving some of it back, or whether that is the bare minimum.
That is an important conversation, but it is not the point of this post.
The point is simpler: a lot of good could happen over the next decade. But if we are serious about improving society, we need to learn from the past.
Too often, we build systems that put plasters over wounds instead of asking why the wound keeps appearing.
Healthcare is the clearest example for me.
The NHS is one of the most important institutions in Britain, but so much of what it deals with is downstream of how society is designed: poor food environments, loneliness, stress, pollution, sedentary work, bad housing, weak communities, and inequality.
When huge numbers of people develop chronic or preventable conditions, it cannot simply be explained as individual failure. It points to something deeper in the way we live.
That is the grey area I want to explore.
I do not believe in rejecting modern medicine. If someone needs medication, they should take it. Prescriptions save lives. Hospitals save lives. Science saves lives.
But I also do not believe the future of health should be reduced to more prescriptions, more appointments, more tracking, more optimisation, and more pressure on individuals to solve problems that were created socially.
There has to be a space between naive wellness culture and purely reactive healthcare.
This Substack is my attempt to explore that space.
I left medical school still believing that healthcare mattered, but increasingly unsure that healthcare alone could make people healthy. Since then, I’ve kept coming back to the same question:
How can technology, funding, culture, policy, and community be used to elevate health at the root rather than simply manage decline?
I don’t have the answer yet. That is partly why I’m writing.
This will be a place for me to follow rabbit holes, ask better questions, and share what I’m learning along the way. I’ll write about health, technology, public goods, cities, prevention, culture, community, and the strange ways our environments shape our lives.
I’ll only explore questions I genuinely find interesting. Otherwise, I don’t see the point.
My hope is that this becomes useful for other people who also feel the pull to have some kind of impact on the world, but do not want to default to shallow optimism, empty critique, or individualised self-help.
We need better systems.
We need fewer plasters.
And we need to understand why the wounds appear in the first place.
originally published on substack — 2026-07-05