The Real Problem of Humanity: Accelerating Evolutionary Mismatch

Overview

Humanity faces an unprecedented crisis as our technological evolution rapidly outpaces our biological capacity to adapt. This creates a growing mismatch between our ancient brains and our modern, hyper-connected world. This accelerating evolutionary mismatch is the root cause of much of our individual and societal suffering, from rising mental health issues to political polarization. As artificial intelligence propels this mismatch to new extremes, we must collectively decide not just how much progress to make, but where this progress should take us.

The Madness We All Feel

Something feels profoundly wrong with our world, doesn't it? That constant knot of anxiety as you scroll through endless feeds. The creeping sense that the Treadmill of Life keeps accelerating beyond your ability to keep pace. Mental health problems, loneliness, and suicide rates are rising across various groups, amplified by algorithms of attention trapture that profit from our outrage and fear at our expense.

But here's what most people miss: These aren't just random problems or temporary crises. They're symptoms of something far deeper—a truth we fear to admit. We are having a natural response to an increasingly unnatural world. Our feelings of collective madness aren't misperceptions or delusions—they are messengers telling us something is profoundly wrong with our world. We must heed these warning signals by trying to understand what's happening to us.

As Marie Curie reminded us, "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." We must understand the root of the problem.

Ask AI: " Despite unprecedented wealth and safety, why are anxiety and feelings of being lost more prevalent than ever? Could there be a fundamental disconnect between our current environment and our innate human nature?"

The Real Problem Revealed

What's wrong with our world is this: We've progressed too quickly for our own good. The pace of change has finally exceeded our ability to adapt to it. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson was correct when he warned, "The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology."

The equation is devastatingly simple:

Greater progress = greater evolutionary mismatch = greater suffering.

We're running godlike software on Stone Age hardware. Exponential technological progress, now supercharged by artificial intelligence (AI), rockets past our ability to adapt. In essence, we have inadvertently "technoformed" Earth into an alien world that we never evolved to inhabit. The crazy world we've created for ourselves is making us all a little crazy.

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." — Albert A. Bartlett

Technology is accelerating faster than our ability to comprehend it. Our ancient brains, which evolved to detect immediate threats like predators or hostile tribes, have no capacity to perceive non-linear, complex threats that evolve exponentially. This makes us blind to the very forces reshaping our existence.

The Paradox of Progress

This is humanity's greatest challenge: The very intelligence that enabled us to transform the world is now creating conditions that are unfit for our survival. Like Icarus, we have soared toward the sun on wings of our own making, and we fail to see that the wax is already melting.

How can we know whether we're making true progress when we haven't agreed upon what progress actually means? Without a shared vision of where we want to go, our "progress" blasts us into different directions rather than bringing us together.

Speaking of the Industrial Revolution of his day, Henry David Thoreau warned, "We have improved means to unimproved ends." Two centuries later, our means have improved exponentially...but have our ends?

We don't seem to have learned from countless cautionary tales such as Prometheus, Pandora's Box, Frankenstein's monster, The Terminator, and The Matrix. We feverishly race forward without knowing where we're going. If our progress fragments us and causes us to hate one another, is it really progress? As Isaac Asimov warned in 1988, "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

The Progress Paradox is this: The progress we evolved to achieve has resulted in us creating a world we didn't evolve to inhabit. The mind-boggling implication is that to survive, we must transcend the very evolutionary heritage that got us here.

Ask AI: "E.O. Wilson said we have 'Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.' How could this one insight connect problems like political polarization and rampant anxiety today?"

Science Blinded: When Understanding Can't Keep Pace

Our technological progress isn't just outpacing our biological evolution—it's now outrunning our ability to understand it. This creates perhaps the most alarming aspect of our evolutionary mismatch: we can no longer use science as a candle in the dark to light our way forward.

The scientific method—our greatest tool for understanding reality—requires time. Researchers must gather data, analyze results, peer-review findings, replicate studies, and build consensus. This process unfolds over years, sometimes decades. But AI is transforming our world in months, sometimes weeks.

Consider this troubling scenario: Toddlers today will grow up with AI chatbot toys answering their questions, teaching them about the world, and shaping their developing minds. What happens to our kids when AIs begin parenting them? Or becomes their best friend? By the time we could conduct longitudinal studies to find out, those AI systems will have evolved through countless iterations, making our findings obsolete before they’re published.

Navigating Without a Map

This isn't just an academic problem. Businesses face the same dilemma. Companies developing AI-powered products might spend months on development, testing, legal compliance, and marketing—only to find their innovation rendered obsolete by a new AI model before launch day. Everything we know about predicting markets, careers, and education is crumbling—because tomorrow won’t resemble yesterday. We are misperceiving reality.

Our medieval institutions—from academia to government to business—simply cannot adapt at AI speed. Our predictions about the future have always been based on patterns from the past, but what happens when the past becomes irrelevant to an unrecognizable future? We're trying to study a tornado while standing inside of it.

Titanic Humanity: Our Shared Peril

In essence, we are passengers aboard Titanic Humanity and accelerating exponentially into icy waters with no clear navigation system. The algorithms of the attention economy, which monetize division and outrage while imprisoning us within echo chambers, have already damaged our shared perception of reality. When we don't share the same truths, we cannot be set free by them. Shared truths unite us. But we remain trapped within a luxury cruise ship. We are so distracted by comfort and infighting that we're oblivious to the icebergs dead ahead.

The mathematical reality is stark. Eight billion humans are consuming and polluting at unsustainable rates, while our technologies evolve beyond our comprehension or control. Many of us sense the icebergs ahead—it's why anxiety about the future pervades both sides of the political divide. Yet instead of uniting to change course, we hatefully blame each other. Paradoxically, it is this mutual blaming that creates the very icebergs that could sink our ship. As Martin Luther King reminded us, "We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now." The question is no longer whether we are all in the same boat—but whether we will sink together on Titanic Humanity or change course in time.

This accelerating mismatch demands leaders with unprecedented wisdom, humility, and flexibility. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary challenges require extraordinary unity. Yet, the attention economy is causing us to devolve into tribal hatred instead of loving our neighbors as ourselves.

We cannot simply innovate our way out of this mismatch unless we deliberately redirect our technological progress toward bringing people together rather than pulling them apart. The very tools dividing us must be redesigned to bridge our divides. This means confronting a difficult truth: we must end the attention economy before it ends us. As long as algorithms profit from outrage and division, our technologies will continue to amplify our tribal instincts rather than help us transcend them. We must recognize our shared peril and choose unity over the fear, anger, outrage, and division from which the attention economy profits at our expense.

Ask AI: "If science can't keep up with hyper-fast technology, what other forms of wisdom might guide humanity through unprecedented change?"

Why We Can't Adapt Fast Enough

Our brains evolved over millions of years to handle linear, predictable change in small hunter-gatherer groups of about 50-150 people. Now, they face exponential technological acceleration, triggering chronic stressors—anxiety, depression, attention disorders—that our biology was never equipped to handle. We've moved from lives that were simple but brutal to lives that are complex but effortless. This represents an evolutionary upheaval so vast our brains haven't evolved to comprehend it.

Think of your five biggest stressors right now. Would a hunter-gatherer 300,000 years ago have faced any of them? If not, you're experiencing evolutionary mismatch. First World Problems aren't trivial—they feel overwhelming precisely because we never evolved to handle them.

The diseases of civilization—obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety, insomnia—are proliferating because our bodies and minds evolved for a world that no longer exists. Evolution's final test is not one of biology, but transcending our biology through enlightened wisdom. Our challenge is this: We must transcend the evolutionary heritage that got us here so that we are able to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Ask AI: "Humans are naturally tribal – how could we use technology to overcome that instinct instead of amplify it?"

The Digital Dopamine Trap

Give a rat a lever that stimulates its brain's pleasure center, and it will press it endlessly—ignoring food, water, and sleep until it collapses. Now, imagine that lever is your phone.

Like the rat pressing the lever, we keep scrolling—because AI has turned our attention into the most valuable currency on the planet. Our smartphones and social media platforms target our primitive reward systems, offering an endless stream of likes, notifications, and validation. Algorithms don't exist to enrich our lives - they hijack our brains and sell our focus to the highest bidder.

Digital platforms are not in the business of truth - they're in the business of capturing our attention. With each angry share and inflammatory comment, we unknowingly create the very icebergs that threaten “Titanic Humanity.” What divides us enriches them.

Unlike the simple lever presented to laboratory rats, our digital world offers something far more insidious—algorithms that learn exactly what keeps us engaged and optimize for maximum stimulation. These systems aren't just passive tools. They actively reshape our thought patterns, attention spans, and our brains’ reward areas to keep us hooked.

We were promised freedom with smartphones—an open world of infinite knowledge, entertainment, and connection. Instead, we are entrapped within them -- connected to the lever we keep pressing incessantly. Or, as the band The Smashing Pumpkins put it: "Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage." And to think that verse was written in 1995 -- a dozen years before the introduction of the iPhone. What have we become?

Consider this dramatic shift: Until the introduction of smartphones about 20 years ago, we spent zero time on these devices. Now, Americans spend around 4 to 6 hours daily on smartphones—a mindboggling 30 to 40% of our waking hours. Simultaneously, we've gone from spending most of our time connected to nature throughout human history to many of us spending virtually zero hours immersed in it.

When it comes to experiencing life in our sci-fi world, we often choose an imitation of life because it feels even better than the real thing. It's just like how we often prefer junk, hyper-processed foods over their natural counterparts. As we grow increasingly disconnected from natural sources of reward (meaningful work, social connection, physical movement, time in nature), we become more dependent on artificial stimulation.

This digital dopamine trap doesn't just hijack individual attention. It warps our collective consciousness. Our lived experience is now an alien existence.

Ask AI: "Why is AI better at influencing human behavior than any technology before it?"

The Fast-Food Culture of the Mind

Culture used to evolve over generations. Now, it shifts in hours. TikTok trends rise and die in a day. Memes shape reality. We are living in a fast-food culture of the mind—instantly gratifying, but lacking in substance.

As successful YouTuber Hank Green observed on the podcast Hard Fork: "The lesson of TikTok is that culture can happen very fast. Like, the speed of culture is in a lot of ways the speed of connections between humans..."

We've traded depth for endless variety. Once upon a time, popular culture meant something. We watched the same shows and movies, read the same books, sang the same songs, and lived in the same reality. Our shared stories, from Star Wars to Seinfeld, connected us across differences. When millions of people understood "May the Force be with you," the Force truly was with us—because it united us. These cultural touchstones created bridges of understanding between otherwise different people.

Now, algorithms curate personalized content bubbles, fragmenting our once-shared cultural landscape. Each of us exists in a unique information environment, rarely experiencing the same content as our neighbors. Without common cultural anchors, we are becoming unmoored. We are drifting into increasingly separate realities that make meaningful dialogue across differences nearly impossible.

In essence, our limitless choices have undermined our togetherness. This reflects a fundamental trade-off in the digital age—between freedom and unity.

Ask AI: "How is algorithm-driven personalization fracturing society and fueling polarization? What's at stake beyond just politics?"

The Balance of Freedom and Unity

Just as there is a tradeoff between variety and depth, there is a tradeoff between freedom and unity. The freedom to choose our own digital experiences comes at the cost of the shared reality that unites us. Freedom and unity are not opposites, but like Yin and Yang, they co-create and balance one another. When either grows too dominant, harmony is lost.

This balance is something America's Founding Fathers understood deeply, which is why "United" is America's first name. The freedom and variety empowered through our technologies have expanded our individual choices, but at the cost of the depth and shared experiences that connect and unite us. As we race toward greater personalization and individual freedom, we unwittingly sacrifice the unity that makes these freedoms meaningful.

We must remember that it is truth that sets us free, not our tribal loyalties or what we'd like the truth to be. Shared truths unite us, while tribal allegiances divide the house of humanity. This isn't just a cultural shift—it's a fundamental rewiring of our social connections that fuels polarization and division.

All these effects add up to a kind of "climate change" in our collective psyche.

Psychological Climate Change

Just as we have terraformed Earth toward climate change, we've "technoformed" a psychological climate increasingly stressful for humans. Our digital world is a complex system where interconnected components interact in unpredictable ways. Small changes ripple through this network through social contagion, feedback loops, and cascade effects, making it virtually impossible to isolate the effects of "screen time" on well-being.

We now live in a world where emotional contagion spreads at the speed of a tweet. Just as pollution accumulates in our atmosphere, digital toxicity accumulates in our collective psyche, shaping behaviors and worldviews faster than our institutions can react.

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." — Martin Luther King Jr.

Overwhelmed by these intangible forces, people revert to an ancient instinct -- finding someone to blame.

Ask AI: " How does the spread of emotions through digital networks resemble environmental climate change, and what lessons might we learn from climate science to improve our collective well-being?"

Misattributing Our Collective Suffering

"Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule." — Friedrich Nietzsche

The true insanity of our age is this: as we all suffer from the same evolutionary mismatch with our technology-accelerated world, we misattribute our shared discomfort to each other rather than recognizing its true source. Our ancient tribal brains instinctively search for someone to blame, blind to the real culprit—Accelerating Evolutionary Mismatch.

It's not the fault of progressives but rather progress itself. Conservatives keenly feel the strain of this exponential pace of change. When conservatives yearn to "Make America Great Again," they're responding to a genuine sense of disorientation propelled by technological change. The America they miss was slower, more predictable, and less complex—more aligned with our evolutionary heritage.

Meanwhile, progressives embrace technological tools to advance social causes, not realizing these same technologies accelerate the pace of change beyond our ability to adapt. They harness digital platforms to promote equality and inclusion, yet these very platforms fragment our shared reality and undermine the social cohesion needed for collective action.

"We've become captives of a system that has forgotten how humans are meant to live." — Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

Now, we find ourselves trapped -- two warring tribes within the same house. Despite countless warnings from Jesus to America's Founding Fathers about the dangers of division, here we are being torn apart by tribal hatred. It's as if our right arm were attacking our left -- not realizing that we are all connected to the same body.

Ask AI: "Why do humans scapegoat other groups instead of recognizing the systemic causes of suffering? What primitive brain mechanisms drive this response?"

The Path to True Happiness

We cannot find deep happiness in that which our evolutionary ancestors never experienced. Our brains did not evolve to derive long-term happiness from screen-mediated experiences and modern luxuries. That's why our own experiences, the best research, and our deepest spiritual wisdom all point to the same truth: our greatest happiness is experienced in our social relationships, which, historically, all took place in person.

Research consistently shows that close relationships—not wealth or fame—keep people happier and healthier throughout life. Most likely, your greatest happiness involved close social connections, celebrations with friends and family, or shared experiences in real life. No one on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time on TikTok, doomscrolling, or hating their neighbors instead of loving them.

True progress should first ensure that all humans can meet their basic survival needs—that's our evolutionary imperative. We live to survive. But beyond survival lies our spiritual purpose: to expand our circles of compassion until they include everyone. The bullseye of life isn't technological advancement for its own sake or acquiring more than what we have more than enough of—and don't even need. It's the evolution of consciousness itself—learning to love more deeply and freely.

From this perspective, hatred is evolutionary and spiritual failure.

Recognizing this truth is only the beginning — acting on it is our next test.

Ask AI: "If we truly understood that everyone is interconnected, how could that insight help us solve the crises of our evolutionary mismatch? What practical steps could turn that understanding into action?"

The Truth That Lights Our Way Forward

By understanding the true nature of our problem—Accelerating Evolutionary Mismatch—we can begin to find solutions. The reality of our situation, however uncomfortable, distressing, or incomprehensible, is what will ultimately help us free ourselves from this prison.

We are all one species—homo sapiens. We are one tribe—humanity. We all live on the same planet and share the same future. This isn't just poetic language. It's an existential reality. Everything that exists emerges from our interconnectedness.

This One Truth has been recognized by our greatest spiritual teachers for millennia, from Jesus teaching us to love our neighbors as ourselves to the Buddha helping us awaken from the illusion of separateness.

Jesus warned that "a house divided will not stand"—wisdom Lincoln invoked on the eve of Civil War. Yet hidden within this warning lies an even more transcendent truth: a house united will not fall.

The challenges of our modern world, and the sci-fi future we're creating for ourselves, necessitate a much greater level of unity than humanity is currently demonstrating. We cannot solve collective problems using divided approaches in an interconnected world.

What if, instead of algorithms that profit from our division, we created AI as a corrective lens to help us see beyond our tribal biases to the truths that unite us? Rather than being manipulated by technologies that exploit our ancient fears, we could harness AI to reveal the objective reality behind our illusions, delusions, and distortions? When the scales fall from our eyes, we could finally free ourselves of the prison of hatred, “othering,” and tribalism.

Our Evolutionary Crossroads

Perhaps most troubling is how our culture now celebrates the very qualities our greatest spiritual teachers warned against—prioritizing wealth, power, status, and individualism above love, compassion, and unity. As spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle warned: "The insanity of the collective egoic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die: that is our choice now."

As artificial intelligence washes over humanity like a tsunami, we stand on the brink of an evolutionary tipping point: Within a few years, humans will no longer be the most intelligent species on the planet. This unprecedented moment asks: Will we rise to the challenge and use AI to magnify the best in us? Or will we harness its immense power for unimproved ends—the pursuit of power and wealth—that could ultimately lead to our downfall?

There is no fate but what we make for ourselves," as we learned from The Terminator movies. That is, there is no destiny in an indeterminant universe in which we have free will. The most skillful path forward into our brave new world is one of greater unity, but we must choose it.

Our greatest evolutionary challenge is that our survival requires unity. This means that we must transcend tribalism. We are here to choose love over hate, compassion over selfishness, and unity over division. True wealth isn't measured in billions, bitcoin, power, or followers—it's measured in love. This is the truth that sets us free to unity.

Will we steer our Titanic Humanity toward the safe harbor of unity, or will our divisions chart a course to disaster? We are all passengers aboard Titanic Humanity, and we must work together to steer progress wisely. The most skillful path into our collective future is together.

What is humanity’s true “improved end”? Where do we actually want all this progress to take us? If AI will shape the future, shouldn’t we ensure it serves the Highest Good? What if, instead of pursuing wealth and power, we trained AI to help us love our neighbors as ourselves? And if Truth sets us free, why not use AI to uncover the deepest truths—so that we may finally experience the greatest freedom?

We know this Truth about humanity -- when we work together, there is no stopping us. Each of us can choose to use AI to overcome the barriers to loving our neighbor. Then our house united will not fall. Titanic Humanity will sail safely to shores that not even John Lennon could have imagined.

Humanity stands at a crossroads unprecedented in history. Will our tribal past doom our high-tech future, or will we unite to evolve in ways our genes never prepared us for? The choice between division and unity, between fear and love, will determine whether Titanic Humanity sinks or sails. Our fate is in our hands – and we merely have to live the Truth we already know to set ourselves free. We must choose – while we still have time.

References

Bartlett, A. A. (2004). The essential exponential!: For the future of our planet. Center for Science, Mathematics & Computer Education, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Avery.

Chödrön, P. (2001). When things fall apart: Heart advice for difficult times. Shambhala Publications.

Cutler, H. C., & Dalai Lama. (1998). The art of happiness: A handbook for living. Riverhead Books.

Dunbar, R. I. M. (2018). The anatomy of friendship. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(1), 32–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.10.004

Easter, M. (2021). The comfort crisis: Embrace discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self. Harmony Books.

Eyal, N. (2014). Hooked: How to build habit-forming products. Portfolio/Penguin.

Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.

Hanh, T. N. (1987). Being peace. Parallax Press.

Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (Reprint ed.). Harper Perennial. (Original work published 2011)

Klaas, B. (2022). Fluke: Chance, chaos, and why everything we do matters. Scribner.

Quinn, D. (1992). Ishmael: An adventure of the mind and spirit. Bantam/Turner Books.

Quinn, D. (1996). The story of B. Bantam Books.

Sagan, C. (1995). The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark. Random House.

Statista. (2023). Average daily time spent on mobile device in the United States from 2018 to 2023. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045353/mobile-device-daily-usage-time-in-the-us/

Tolle, E. (2005). A new earth: Awakening to your life’s purpose. Dutton.

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books.

van Vugt, M., Li, N. P., & Colarelli, S. M. (2024). Evolutionary mismatched lifestyles and health outcomes: A review. Evolutionary Psychology, 22(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/14747049231219096

Waldinger, R. J., & Schulz, M. S. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.

Wilson, E. O. (2012). The social conquest of earth. Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Comments