A very interesting article was published in Phys.org about how modern life might be outpacing our mind, which evolved to deal with a simpler world:
The human brain evolved for a world of familiar faces, immediate threats and small social groups. But the world around us is changing far faster than human biology can keep pace. That mismatch may help explain some of the stress, loneliness and constant comparison people experience today.
The review, co-authored by Dr. Jose Yong, senior lecturer at James Cook University, Singapore, and Dr. Sarah Chan, research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at SUTD, is published in Behavioral Sciences.
Evolutionary mismatch describes what happens when human instincts shaped in one kind of environment are forced to operate in a very different one. Humans evolved in smaller, close-knit groups, where danger, belonging, status and trust were read through familiar people and everyday face-to-face signals. [...]
Social media makes this mismatch especially visible. The urge to understand our place within a group may once have helped people maintain trust and cooperation among familiar faces. Today, that same instinct can be triggered by an endless stream of curated lives, achievements and status signals.
At the center of the paper is competition. Modern environments can intensify the feeling that others are judging, outperforming or leaving us behind. [...]
"Competition is not new, but modern life can make it feel constant," said Yong. "An evolutionary perspective may help explain why people respond so strongly to comparison and the fear of falling behind, even when those signals come from strangers or screens rather than a small social group."
The paper draws on existing research and theory rather than new data. It presents evolutionary mismatch as one way of understanding modern social and psychological problems, alongside psychological, social and economic explanations. These ideas will need to be tested through real-world research.
That matters because the response to modern stress cannot rest only on telling individuals to be more resilient. If environments are activating old instincts in new and unhelpful ways, then cities, workplaces, digital platforms and communities also need to be part of the solution. [...]
"Stress, loneliness and anxiety are often treated as personal or lifestyle problems," said Chan. "But they may also reflect a mismatch between the environments people live in and the conditions our minds and bodies evolved to navigate. That means we should think not only about individual resilience, but also about how cities and communities are designed."
None of this is an argument for returning to a simpler past or a suggestion that modern life is inherently broken. It is a case for designing the present more thoughtfully. Understanding where modern life conflicts with the conditions human beings evolved to navigate could help researchers, designers and policymakers create cities and communities that feel less alienating and more supportive of everyday well-being.
More information
Jose C. Yong et al, Evolutionary Mismatch, Stress, and Competition: Making Sense of Psychosocial Problems in the Polycrisis Era, Behavioral Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.3390/bs16050650
(Score: 3, Funny) by Barenflimski on Monday July 06, @04:11PM (15 children)
Thats a funny way of saying, 'Y'all slow!'
Pretty sure even the half-smart ones will learn to quit comparing themselves to marketing personalities eventually.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 06, @06:50PM (5 children)
Pretty sure even the half-smart ones have failed to quit comparing themselves to marketing personalities since Twiggy and before.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06, @08:14PM
Yet another form of "Rank and Yank" practiced in the modern competitive workplace.
Airline stewardess? Go for the twiggy. Minimize dead weight. One certainly doesn't want a 400 pound porker!
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Monday July 06, @09:54PM (3 children)
Makes you wonder who still reads People magazine, and what they get out of it.
I bet the smart ones know if you really want do it right, go to a fan convention for something you enjoy and strike up a few conversations. That'll get your comparison game on at an industrial level.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 06, @10:01PM (2 children)
I recommend "Wishful Drinking" for a little insight into "the privileged lives of the famous and connected."
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday July 07, @05:47PM (1 child)
Well, sort of. Except you can't sell a lap dance you got on the pre-owned enthusiast market. You also don't have to have it authenticated, I guess :0)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 07, @09:13PM
Not my analogy, just her perspective - or something funny she came up with her ghost / consulting writer.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mcgrew on Monday July 06, @07:24PM (8 children)
I didn't RTFA but what I see in the submission tells me the people who did the study are as ignorant as the rest of us. It speaks of instinct and danger, but dangerous things have changed drastically not just in the last twenty years but at least ten thousand.
For ten thousand years the biggest danger to a person was another person. Yeah, once in a while an Indian might be eaten by a tiger but he was far more prone to being murdered by a human.
Then about a hundred years ago your biggest threat became an automobile.
We are social animals. Set your cruise control to five miles an hour under the limit on the interstate and you will see all those people traveling in herds. One speeds up, they all speed up. They see a cop? They all slow down, even though they were already at a legal speed.
Funny, I'm having no problem with modern life, but I'm retired. What stresses people about modern life is not being afford life's necessities because the 1% are fraudsters and thieves who steal your labor and have no empathy for anyone.
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 06, @08:14PM (7 children)
>What stresses people about modern life is not being afford life's necessities because the 1% are fraudsters and thieves who steal your labor and have no empathy for anyone.
Human societies (and many identifiable mammal societies) have always had hierarchy - those 1% fraudsters and theives at the top - lack of empathy is sort of a pre-requisite for the position.
In a long rambling "discussion" elsewhere on SN recently I came to the conclusion that my "root of all evil" are the social structures (and people in society creating, maintaining and strengthening systems that) making the rich richer, the poor poorer, and draining off the middle class - mostly to the bottom side.
Make me chief noodle (are we all good pastafarians?) and one of my royal decrees shall be: "Any new law shall demonstrate its neutrality to or reduction of wealth disparity." Think neutrality sounds easy? A new law, regarding an arrestable offense - if is expected to increase the number of arrests, who will be being arrested? How will this arrest impact their earnings? What percentage of their livelihood will be unavoidably diverted to dealing with this issue? Scandinavia has something along these lines for speeding tickets: fines as a percentage of annual income...
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07, @04:07AM
Yeah, once cities were formed, competition was no longer just from small groups.
More than a thousand years ago, lots of normal folk in China were competing against tens of thousands if not more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination [wikipedia.org]
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-civil-service [britannica.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 07, @11:46AM (5 children)
There are solutions to that problem, though:
1. When some narcissistic jerk starts giving orders, especially in more "primitive" societies, nobody else is really obligated to follow them, more of a collective "let's not and tell him we did".
2. Create totally powerless positions of prestige and apparent importance, but with very little real influence. The narcissistic jerks keep themselves busy fighting over who gets to be Grand Poo-bah during the Annual Ceremonial Week, and meanwhile everyone else just does their thing.
3. Point them at some sort of external enemy, preferably a long ways away and extremely powerful, and tell them the way they can really show off how truly great they are is to go defeat those bad guys way over there. While they're off doing that, they're out of the hair of everybody else.
4. If they get to be too much of a problem, get rid of them, permanently. e.g. "You just won the ceremonial ball game and proved you were the strongest and fastest person in our community, Mr super-powerful King who definitely hasn't caused any trouble for his society. In honor of your victory, you get the privilege of becoming our human sacrifice for the gods this year, aren't you lucky?"
What doesn't work at all is fawning all over them and seeing them as actually worthy of emulation, or giving them too much real actual power.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 07, @12:15PM (4 children)
>tell them the way they can really show off how truly great they are is to go defeat those bad guys way over there. While they're off doing that, they're out of the hair of everybody else.
I don't think of the Inquisition as a bright spot in history...
>In honor of your victory, you get the privilege of becoming our human sacrifice for the gods this year, aren't you lucky?
The Surinamese revolution just came out and did it: kill a few of the most offensive lawyers and get on with a better life in their absence. The perspectives on how good or evil that particular episode was vary wildly depending on who is telling the tale.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 07, @02:41PM (3 children)
In my "send them to fight way over there", it's not good where the fighting is happening, but it can be very good for the people back home.
My mental example on the "congrats, you'll be the sacrifice" was the Mayans. That ball game seems to have been a mechanism for keeping the psycho warrior types in line.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 07, @03:07PM (2 children)
When I said Inquisition I was actually thinking Crusades... my internal mental map conflates the two as: church in action.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 07, @05:06PM (1 child)
And the Crusades absolutely sucked if you were in Constantinople, Antioch, Tyre, Jerusalem, and Cairo. But was very useful for Britain, France, and what is now Germany and Italy, because the guys who used to be fighting each other in Western Europe were instead fighting Turks and Arabs in the east.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 07, @09:05PM
Unless you believe the Inquisition was a result of the Crusades, in which case it all kind of balanced out in the end... if you were one of the lucky ones called to face the Inquisitor.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by looorg on Monday July 06, @05:39PM (1 child)
It was more that ancient brain was used for burst of speed and then slow paces. But now it seems to be go-go-faster all the time, or a lot more. That said I do think that we are keeping up in that regard. But at the same time I find that more and more people want to, and do, disconnect from the go-go-always-updated-and-connected life. As they eventually realize that FOMO-life is bullshit and they are not really missing out on anything and all these "friends" they have online are not really friends in that regard. The constant updates are not really updating you cause nothing that important is really happening or it's happening someplace far far away and it doesn't concern you. You are being manipulated by (social-) media.
You still have small groups of friends and people you engage with. Social media wants to sell a fantasy that you have lots of friends or know a lot of people. But they don't matter. So even with your millions of online faces and friends you are still lonely. Cause they are not real in the small group sense. Just like the cat that watches a cat on a screen fairly quickly lose interest, cause the thing on the screen is fake and no fun.
Threat-wise I still prefer the modern world to ancient times, much less risk of (violent) death even tho we are led to believe otherwise.
But they are all fake, and bullshit. They don't matter. But the evil twats over at Facebook et al hired people to fuck with your brain. Making you believe that these things matter. When they really don't. You did not become happier or more engaged or whatnot. Instead you became a doom-scroll-zombie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07, @10:05AM
That is a big reason I have not registered with social media. Linked-in, no way! I already know too many people who registered there. God help whoever took one in! Just as deceitful as dating sites. It's full of wolves and sheep. The sheep come looking for a mark or a home, and the wolves are out for Expendables. There is nothing there for me. I might as well walk the tenderloin district dressed in a suit and tie.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 06, @06:37PM (2 children)
When the telegraph started bringing news of the world instantly across hundreds of miles, that was an overnight jolt to brains that evolved across millennia to deal with first what their senses told them, and second what they heard communicated from others. Centuries earlier, the dead had started to speak more reliably and voluminously through mass produced books - much more information than was ever inscribed on stone tablets or other long lived (EXPENSIVE!) artifacts from the past. But, still, most people didn't read or write and continued to function on their own senses plus such word of mouth as they heard and trusted. Even in the 1700s, no one human mind could process and retain or even access all the knowledge available in the great libraries, most didn't even begin to try.
By the time radio was bringing news of "the great wars" into living rooms in real-time, the evolved brain was already overwhelmed. Many went into denial mode, unable to process the descriptions of the horrors unfolding elsewhere, even as their own husbands and sons experienced them firsthand, most filtered this - sheltered their homelands from graphic descriptions of what they had seen and experienced personally.
Television came within a generation, and this time the pictures are so easy to consume even people disinclined to read or write are now seeing and hearing "with their own senses" instant communications from places they have never been and likely will never be. After a generation or two, the content shown on television now regularly presents more information about more places than it is physically possible to travel to and experience in a lifetime. You can travel the globe, you can "visit all 205 countries" out there, but even the Principality of Monaco takes more than a week to experience more than superficially, and countries like Brazil and the United States and India, and China could take a lifetime just to experience all the various sub-cultures contained in a single one.
We've been overwhelmed for generations now, and denial is getting harder, so the denialists are going harder still - ignoring most of what they see and hear, focusing on their own world-view which, evolutionarily, can only relate to about 200 other people at a time - everyone else gets a stereotyped, pigeon-holed and pre-judged. But we're not presented with 200 people or less in our daily media immersions, we're told about events all over the globe involving thousands, millions, billions of people we likely will never meet personally.
Have we hit a tipping point? I say: nah, people were cracking up from the pressures of modern life 500+ years ago. The only thing more overwhelming than life in modern civilization? Life without the protections modern civilization affords to the vast majority of us.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06, @08:05PM (1 child)
I find modern communication speed a big stressor.
Something happens to someone else. The means now exist to make sure you know about it and are going through the obligatory social response rituals.
High speed transportation is also available for compliance with personal attendance, at a price "easily affordable over hundreds of "small monthly installments"", thanks to bankers, investors, and credit scoring .
Some will see this as "selfish", others will see it as "being financially responsible".
Yes, I do fear becoming a "debt slave", as once one owes a debt, one becomes a slave until that debt is paid. It's well known many rich people got that way by figuring out under what conditions people will sign themselves into debt. Meeting social expectations is high on that list.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 06, @09:59PM
> the obligatory social response rituals.
I find those born post 1990 have an "evolved" sense of obligatory social response, maybe devolved, in any event: it's the ghost. Non response. As if it's normal to just compeltely ignore when somebody sends you an e-mail, or a text or whatever. It is one way of coping with the volume of things that reach their senses every minute of every waking hour...
> bankers, investors, and credit scoring .
Second order of business for the chief noodle: cooking down the financial sector to remove its associations with gambling, profiteering, loan sharking, etc.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06, @06:39PM
tfa seems to suggest that cities be re-built to solve this problem. Short of war and the destruction of cities (which I don't recommend!), rebuilding cities takes generations. That's one of the reasons that urban planners always seem to be so out of touch...and usually lacking the budgets to do much of anything significant.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 06, @09:34PM
Two comments:
LKY was a good bro and should be a model for other statesmen (perhaps not politicians). An interesting dude.
The other comment is this article reads like someone trolling with an LLM prompt "Write an article about Dunbar's number but without using the phrase Dunbar's number anywhere in the article" OK then. That's interesting. Kind of. But only kind of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number [wikipedia.org]
AFAIK Dunbar is both alive and hasn't gotten cancelled for not being rainbow enough or whatever insane reasons by those types, so I don't see the point in throwing shade on him by pretending his work never existed. Its just weird. Maybe he stuck chewing gum on the sidewalk in Singapore and escaped without being caned so this is retribution LOL.
Its not just "a number" the dude is pretty interesting see this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence#Social_brain_hypothesis [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday July 07, @12:51PM (1 child)
Why compete?
If there is no scarcity of resources, there is no need to compete for them. If you feel 'compelled' to compete for something for which there is no scarcity, who is doing the compelling, and why?
It is well know that there is no scarcity of food in the world: 'merely' a problem of distributing it. We should be living in a post-scarcity society, but we are not, which means that there is a vested interest somewhere to maintain artificial scarcity and thereby force people to compete rather than co-operate.
If we turn it around, social media is competing for each individual's limited attention span. That's where the scarcity is. At the moment, most people sell their attention too cheaply, possibly even giving it away, or paying people to take it.
My fee for watching a sport I don't like would be rather high. If you value your attention, social media will die.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday July 08, @01:44PM
Don't we do something similar right here with mod points?
As far as I am concerned, they provide a means to reply "thank you for sharing your take on it". Without resorting to all those redundant "me too! ".
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Funny) by acid andy on Tuesday July 07, @04:23PM
Record everything as the person goes about their day. Play it back at half speed through a VR headset. Of course by itself this would cause them to fall behind on things, but that can be solved by showing them a split screen, with events recorded during odd seconds on the top half and the even seconds on the bottom half. Each is shown at half speed, so each second of video is shown for two seconds, therefore their mind is no longer outpaced.
With this new, better kind of glasshole, we truly have a wonderful future ahead of us.
Note: If the above solution turns out not to work, the alternative is to feed all of the day's events into an LLM and have it write a compact summary of them, convert it into a movie script and generate video to feed into the headset. Again the video will be shorter than the actual day length, so can be streamed at a slower speed.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.