John R. Miles

Every algorithm you touch is engineered to keep you engaged with groups of millions, maybe hundreds of millions.

It serves your outrage from strangers you'll never meet, comparisons with lives you'll never live, opinions from people who don't know your name.

The digital world is pushing you toward a tribe of a billion.

Your biology, though, is quietly screaming for a tribe of 150.

That friction, that group size mismatch is the silent engine driving so much of the burnout, the anxiety, the exhaustion so many of us feel.

It's why you can scroll for an hour and feel more drained than if you'd run five miles.

It's why the world's problems feel crushing even when your own life is objectively okay.

It's what Henry David Thoreau meant by living in quiet desperation.

Because you're emotionally overleveraged.

You're trying to carry the weight of a global village on a skeleton built for a small band of hunter-gatherers.

I want you to hear this clearly.

The anxiety you feel when you look at the world isn't a character flaw.

It's not because you're not empathetic enough, or informed enough, or resilient enough.

It's biology meeting technology.

Ehrlich warns that if we don't recognize this predicament,

we're headed towards a ghastly future of deeper division and despair.

But there is a way out.

We can't rewire our neocortex, but we can rewire our social world.

We can choose to shrink the map so we can finally find our way home.

But to find that way home, we have to challenge a modern myth.