When Business Shapes Minds and Cities: How Profit-Centric Economies Influence Human and Planetary Wellbeing

Why is the dominant business logic structurally producing urban, psychological, educational, and ecological harm? This paper addresses this question by examining how the intertwined crises contemporary societies face, ranging from urban dysfunction and declining mental and physical health to educational disengagement and ecological instability, are interconnected outcomes of a shared systemic root. While policy responses typically treat these challenges as separate sectoral problems and rely on technical solutions, they often leave the underlying conditions that generate them largely unchanged. The paper advances a systemic diagnosis: these cross-domain harms emerge from the dominant definition of business as an entity oriented toward profit maximization and continuous growth. It conceptualizes business-as-usual as an invisible environmental designer embedded in institutional incentives, governance structures, and performance metrics. Through its influence on cities, workplaces, digital infrastructures, and educational systems, this paradigm reorganizes space, time, and social relations in ways that prioritize financial extraction while externalizing human and ecological costs. Drawing on political economy, environmental psychology, and systems theory, the analysis traces how this logic materializes across four domains: urban environments, public health, education systems, and planetary metabolism. It further examines the mechanisms through which the system stabilizes itself, including cognitive overload, erosion of perceived agency, and institutional short-termism, which collectively reinforce the value–action gap between sustainability awareness and behaviour. By identifying profit-centric business logic as a structural driver of cross-domain harm, the paper shifts the analytical focus from isolated symptoms to the economic paradigm embedded in everyday environments. This diagnosis provides the foundation for Paper II, which proposes redefining business as an entity that solves social issues and creates social value in financially sustainable ways.