But beneath these tidy growth figures, the story is beginning to shift. In 2022, inflation surged to 5.5 percent, driven largely by imported energy and food costs. Over 70 percent of Indonesia’s wheat, 60 percent of its sugar and much of its upstream energy needs still rely on foreign sources.

The old growth formula, more people, more consumption, more gross domestic product (GDP), feels increasingly mismatched with the nation’s economic realities. The extensive growth model that once propelled the archipelago forward now shows signs of strain.

Yet this is more than a technical constraint. It invites a deeper, more unsettling inquiry: Are we clinging to outdated ideas of what development looks like? Have our assumptions about value creation, institutional legitimacy and human capital kept pace with the world we now inhabit?

In the language of scholars, this is a question of ontology, how we understand what is real, and epistemology, how we decide what we know. But these are not abstract musings.

To navigate the fog ahead, we require more than sharper instruments. We must learn to ask better questions.

Across Indonesian classrooms, the scene is familiar: Students bent over notebooks, memorizing facts chalked onto blackboards. But just beyond those classroom walls, the world is shifting with disorienting speed. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the labor market, climate shocks are disrupting communities and digital platforms have collapsed traditional gatekeepers of knowledge.