You feel it. There's a sense of unease and anger that pervades the world. No matter how much wealth, knowledge, entertainment, accomplishments one has, the world seems to be getting worse the better things are.
You are a human, an animal. You have barely evolved from the humans that walked the earth 50,000 years ago. You are still a Paleolithic brain controlling a body that evolved for environments completely different from the ones you live in today.
Your brain does what evolution programmed it to do: survive.
It seeks rewards that help you live another day. Every day, that same brain is exposed to an environment engineered to exploit it. What used to be the reward of a challenging hunt, of a social conquest after hard work, of a personal accomplishment that took a lot of commitment, now is just reward.
Food engineered to keep you hungry and costs nothing, an infinite stream of porn designed to hijack sexual reward circuits, notifications calibrated to trigger compulsive checking behavior. The environment you now live in delivers every day rewards at intensities that would have been impossible for your ancestors to experience in a lifetime.
The result is mismatch.
We have always known it, but somewhere along the way, we forgot what we are.
We built theories of human nature that treated the mind as infinitely plastic, the body as incidental and inconvenient, and culture as the only variable that matters, editable by policy alone. We designed institutions around these theories. We created technologies that exploit the gap between what we assumed and what is actually true. Ignoring our nature, or even worse, hoping the nature would quickly adapt.
Now we wonder why everything feels broken. Why willpower and discipline fail. Why depression and obesity and loneliness spread like contagion through populations that have more comfort, choice, and entertainment than any humans in history. We look for explanations in politics, in economics, in individual moral failure but we miss the obvious: we are animals, and we built a world designed for machines.
Humans are animals. We evolved in specific environments over millions of years.
Our brains, bodies, and social instincts are evolutionary adaptations: solutions to problems that existed in ancestral conditions and that we literally evolved for.
We are NOT blank slates.
We are burdened by what has been and we cannot be reprogrammed by education or policy or wishful thinking. We have natures.
And those natures have reward systems calibrated for scarcity.
The dopaminergic system, that brain circuit that generates motivation through reward anticipation, has evolved to drive effort toward rare and valuable outcomes because the more of them you could find, the more you survived.
(Note: dopamine is primarily a motivation and learning signal, not a "pleasure chemical". It makes you want things, not enjoy them.)
Finding ripe fruit, hunting game and taking it home, achieving social recognition, conquering a mate. These were infrequent events that if you could achieve it meant you could live longer and spread your genes. That deserved the dopamine burst. you should want more of them. The system expected intermittent reinforcement and it calibrated to scarcity. It did not expect abundance. And that was OK, because those events were intrinsically rare.
And here is where the problem appears: modern technology gives you superstimuli, artificially intensified versions of the cues our reward systems evolved for.
What you had to hunt days for, now you can buy for $5 at McDonalds. And worst of all, that food is precisely engineered to achieve the "bliss point": a precise combination of sugar, fat, and salt that maximizes consumption without a sense of fullness.
What your ancestors worked a lifetime for, you now get before breakfast.
Social validation used to require years, building reputation among people who knew your name and watched all your actions. Now you post something and watch numbers go up. The brain circuit responds the same way because it doesn't know the difference. It's the same chemical signal, 1000x over.
Social media runs on variable reinforcement. Sometimes the scroll delivers, sometimes it doesn't. You never know which. So you keep checking "what's the current thing?", "Did i get a like?", "Did I post a banger?".
Slot machines work the same way and that's why you can't stop.
Porn works in a similar way on a different human necessity: sex.
Sexual novelty used to be rare, expensive, earned through effort and rejection and risk. Now it's unlimited, available 24/7, and goes beyond anything a real person can offer. Your system inevitably recalibrates so that actual intimacy feels boring, stale, like work. Because compared to what you trained on, it is.
Food, entertainment, social life, relationships. Every domain now gives you reward that would be absolutely unimaginable to any of your ancestors while requiring none of the effort.
This mismatch produces predictable dysfunction.
Fucked up reward circuits. Depleted motivation for anything that takes work. Addiction. The inability to feel pleasure from normal life. Obesity. Depression. Broken relationships. Scattered attention. Politics of pure reaction. Extremization. Gender wars.
These are all symptoms of the same social sickness. You're running hardware that evolved for scarcity in an environment engineered for exploit.
The data is brutal and it confirms what you already feel.
US adult obesity was 13% in 1960. Now it's 42%. That's not genetics or thick bones. That's not laziness or poor discipline. Ozempic proved this much. That's what happens when you take a system calibrated for scarcity and drown it in engineered abundance.
Japan's obesity is only 4%. Same species but different food environment. Japanese men who migrated to Hawaii and California developed heart disease at Western rates within one generation. Their brothers who stayed in Japan did not. The genes didn't change. The environment did. Engineered environment wins.
And nobody talks about the second part. The food is making you fat, yes. But that's almost the minor issue. Constant high-reward eating keeps your dopamine system firing all day. Your receptors start to dull. Takes more to feel the same hit. The threshold creeps up.
One day you notice that normal food tastes like cardboard. That things you used to enjoy feel numb. You start wondering if you're broken, if something is wrong with your brain. Nothing is wrong with your brain. Your brain is doing exactly what brains do when you flood them with reward signals they never evolved for. It adapted. It protected itself by turning down the sensitivity. And now you live in the dulled aftermath.
That's the depression epidemic, by the way. Or a huge chunk of it. Millions of people walking around with downregulated reward systems, feeling nothing, wondering why they can't feel anything, and nobody tells them the food did it. The phone did it. The porn did it. The endocrine disruptors did it. We hand them SSRIs, send them to $200/hour therapy sessions and wish them luck.
Speaking of your phone, you check it 96 times a day on average.
ONCE EVERY TEN MINUTES YOU ARE AWAKE. And 60% of smartphone users feel phantom vibrations, buzzes that never happened. Your nervous system is so conditioned to expect stimulation that it hallucinates it. A Pavlovian conditioning documented in clinical research.
Sean Parker, the guy who was president of Facebook, said it publicly: "We are exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology"
The vulnerability he's talking about is your orienting response. That slight change in attention when something changes in your environment. Kept your ancestors alive. Predator in the bushes, you notice. Fruit in the tree, you notice. The ones who didn't notice got eaten or starved. So we all have it, this automatic attention grab when something new appears. Attention is all you need (to enslave humans).
Every notification exploits it, and the platforms have been A/B testing this for years on billions of people to figure out exactly how to maximize the pull. Facebook ran experiments on 700,000 users to measure emotional contagion. They know what they're doing. They've optimized for it.
Your attention shatters because shattered attention is the product. Whatever we used to call "thinking", the ability to hold one thing in mind and work on it, requires uninterrupted time. Every notification interrupts. Even waiting for a notification interrupts. Having your phone in the room, even face down, even silent, measurably reduces your cognitive performance. Part of your brain is always listening for it. You're dumber when it's near you. Literally and measurably dumber.
But that's the point. If you are thinking or doing meaningful work, you are not on the platform, and that's very bad for the investors.
And then porn.
I know people don't want to hear this part because it sounds like moralizing and we live in a society where anything that sounds religious is very bad. Where prostitutes are called "content creators", where whores are called "sex workers" as if it's a worthwhile career path. But the mechanism is the same as everything else. Sexual novelty used to be rare and expensive. Required effort, risk, rejection. The reward was calibrated to that scarcity.
Now you can see more variety in an hour than your great-grandfather saw in his entire life. Unlimited, instant, always available, free, with depictions of acts that you never even imagined. And more intense than anything a real person could ever provide. So your system recalibrates, it has to. Real partners start to seem boring. One person versus infinite novelty. It's not a fair fight.
Young men showing up with erectile dysfunction, can't perform with a real partner but no problem with a screen, teenagers not having sex anymore, marriages breaking apart. No coincidence here. This is the same downregulation, same threshold shift. You trained on Formula 1 and now you're trying to get excited about a bicycle. It doesn't work, how could it? the circuits don't fire the same way anymore.
Meanwhile the comparison machine runs all day.
We evolved to compare ourselves to maybe 150 people. Your tribe and village. People you actually knew. You had real information about where you stood because you saw everyone's actual life.
Now you compare yourself to a global highlight reel. Instagram shows you the most photogenic, most successful, most curated humans on the planet. Filtered for maximum envy. That's your reference group now. Not your neighbors or people you've met. The winners of a worldwide beauty and success contest. And if you are not the most looksmaxxed, you're ugly.
And you feel inadequate. Of course you do. The feeling is accurate. Their curated best moments DO look better than your Tuesday. The correct perception of a rigged sample. The algorithm shows you people who make you feel inferior because inferiority keeps you scrolling. You hope the next post makes you feel better (it won't). There's always someone winning bigger.
For teenage girls this gets dark fast. Female social competition has always run on reputation and appearance and social positioning. Now all of it is quantified. Likes. Followers. Comments. A global hierarchy with perfect visibility. Girls who used to compare themselves to 30 classmates now compare themselves to millions of strangers optimized to make them feel ugly.
Teen girl depression was flat all through the 2000s. Then around 2012 it started climbing and hasn't stopped. Exactly when smartphones got into every kid's pocket. Correlation doesn't prove causation. But the timing is something.
All of this feeds on itself.
You're lonely because your connections are screen-mediated and screen-mediated connection doesn't satisfy the way physical presence does. So you eat because food triggers some of the same reward circuits. Or you watch porn. Or you scroll. Trying to fill the gap with whatever hits fastest.
And the dopamine dysregulation from one source raises your threshold everywhere. If you're constantly stimulated by notifications and junk food and porn, suddenly exercise feels pointless. Real conversation takes too much energy. Learning a skill takes too long. Anything that requires effort and pays out later can't compete with the things that require nothing and pay out now. Your motivational system is recalibrated for the wrong environment. Normal life doesn't hit hard enough to move you, you need that BigMac, that orgasm, that banger, that orgasm just to feel something.
Down it goes. Each exposure dulls you a bit more. Which pushes you toward more intense stimuli to feel anything. Which dulls you further. Until you bottom out somewhere, captured by whatever hits hardest, or until something breaks the loop from outside.
I should be honest about where this model breaks down.
Most people in this environment don't end up with clinical diagnoses. Most smartphone users aren't formally depressed. 58% of adults managed not to become obese. So, if the environment is so toxic, why doesn't it destroy everyone equally?
I don't have a clean answer. Genetics play into it, some people have reward systems that resist capture better (higher intelligence and/or agency help). Childhood attachment (healthy families) seems to matter and people growing up in broken families are more prone to this. Conscientious people do better. But I can describe population-level damage without being able to predict who specifically gets hit hardest.
And direction of causality is messy. Maybe depressed people use more social media because it's the only social contact they can manage. Maybe people with broken relationships turn to porn because intimacy was already failing. Hard to untangle with the data we have.
But here's what makes me think it's not just selection, not just vulnerable people revealing themselves: the timing.
If smartphones were just revealing pre-existing problems, you'd expect gradual change as adoption spread. Instead you see inflection. The curves bend around 2012. Something changed. The technology reached saturation and the damage appeared.
I'd change my mind if randomized trials limiting teen phone access showed no mental health benefit (Fortunately the experiment is being run in Australia with their ban of phones in schools and after one year the ban resulted in a 63% decline in critical incidents involving social media and 54% fewer behavioral issues, so there may be a glimpse of hope). If countries with completely different technology exposure had identical pathology rates. If the 2012 inflection turned out to be an artifact of how we measured things. None of that has happened yet.
So what do you actually do about this.
First, stop thinking you're weak. Stop thinking it's a discipline problem. You're doing what your brain was built to do. Seeking reward. Maximum reward. That's the whole design. The problem is the environment, not your character.
Which means willpower is the wrong tool. Willpower is a limited resource. Depletes through the day. The algorithms don't deplete. They're optimized by thousands of engineers with billions of data points. You will not beat them by trying harder. Nobody beats them by trying harder.
You beat them by removing the option.
Delete the apps. Because you're not strong enough to resist. Nobody is. It's designed to be close to impossible to resist!
You remove the choice because the choice itself is rigged. The option to check is the problem. Eliminate the option.
Phone goes in another room when you work. The reflex needs a phone in your hand. Make the phone be somewhere else. You can't wake up every morning expecting to heroically avoid your phone
Friction is your friend. Website blockers. Phone charges in a different room overnight. App limits. Anything that puts a barrier between you and the superstimulus. You're building structures for your worst self, the version of you at 11pm with no willpower left. That version needs walls, intentions are not enough.
Stop eating processed food. I know "moderation" sounds reasonable. Moderation is a lie invented by the companies selling the food. You can't moderately eat something engineered to bypass your satiety signals. That's like trying to moderately play a slot machine. Recovering alcoholics stop drinking altogether for a reason, "just one glass" will send them down another binge. Same with ultraprocessed food. The only move is don't play. If your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, your metabolism doesn't either.
Protect sleep like your life depends on it. Screens in the bedroom destroy it. The light (endocrine disruptor). The content. The simple fact that you're doing something other than sleeping. Remove them entirely. They don't belong there.
Digital sabbath, one day a week without anything digital. The first couple will feel unbearable. That's withdrawal. You're an addict coming off your supply. Push through. Your ancestors did fine for 300,000 years without this shit. You can manage Saturday. On the other side is a nervous system that can feel again.
Time with humans you can touch. Being in a room with someone is neurobiologically different from texting them or being on a videocall. Oxytocin doesn't flow through screens. Presence is not replicable. Put it in your calendar like work. Actually show up.
Kids don't get smartphones until the last possible moment. Every year without one is brain development in a non-captured environment. The adolescent brain is particularly vulnerable. There will be social pressure. Other kids have them. Your kid will say you're ruining their life. Your job is to protect them anyway. You're the parent, not the friend.
And practice being bored. Sit somewhere with nothing. No phone. No book. Nothing. Feel how much you hate it. That hatred is the addiction talking. The discomfort is withdrawal. It passes. On the other side is a brain that can find satisfaction in ordinary things again. That capacity isn't gone. The superstimuli buried it. You have to dig it back out.
The brain does what it evolved to do. The environment changed faster than evolution can track. Mismatch.
We built a world that no Paleolithic brain can handle without intervention. You have to intervene. You have to understand what you actually are, an animal with specific requirements, and build an environment that meets those requirements instead of exploiting the gap.
Willpower won't save you. The algorithms never tire. You do.
Build structures that hold when your willpower fails. Because it will fail. That's biology. Willpower was never designed for this fight.
You are an animal. A sophisticated one. Sophisticated enough to understand your own vulnerabilities. Most people don't. Most people will never read something like this, never update, never build the structures. They'll keep getting captured. Keep wondering why they feel like shit.
You know now. Do something with it.
The reward systems work fine. The environment is broken.
Fix the environment.
