Many people would say that a problem is “a gap between a desired situation and the existing one”.
I don’t agree with this definition.
We would like life expectancy to be around 150 years (and come to think of it, why not even older?) The fact is that it currently isn’t 150 years, and yet we don’t really (at least not directly) label it as a problem.
So a better (and still not complete) definition of a problem would be, “a gap between a desired situation and an existing one that we have reason to believe we can eliminate”.
This is interesting: some people would regard a certain situation as a problem because they believe there may be a solution, while others wouldn’t see any problem because they can’t even envision a way to a solution.
