Our feeble simian brains simply aren’t built for the “polycrisis” of modern life, a new review of existing scholarship suggests.
This hypothesis, outlined in a new study published in the journal Behavioral Sciences, could partly explain why we feel so much stress and loneliness by understanding these mental states as a consequence of an “evolutionary mismatch.”
In a nutshell, we evolved to thrive in small, close-knit communities, and it’s backfiring now that we live in sprawling cities and have huge social networks. Long before we had smartphones to nuke our cerebrums, we relied on being finely attuned to the emotions and signals of others around us, at a time when a bad apple could doom the survival of everyone in the group or community. These same instincts are now overwhelming us, with technology making us more interconnected than ever before. If the invention of the telephone meant that everyone was now just a call away, now the vanity panopticon of social media means we’re constantly mindful of what everyone is doing — or acts like they’re doing — even if they aren’t immediately part of our lives.
That brings us to what may be the biggest factor at play: our unending sense of competition. Competition is useful to keep everyone honest, but at such a large scale it can make us feel judged and listless. That can come from work or popular culture at large. You might be making a fine enough living, but this competitive drive could leave you feeling unfulfilled.
