Sometimes I think the modern human condition is best described by the metaphor of a zoo animal. Not because we’re being controlled by some external zookeeper—but because, like captive animals, we live in environments that are meticulously engineered yet profoundly unnatural. We are safe, fed, entertained—and often deeply unwell in ways that are not immediately obvious to onlookers.
It’s not just romantic nostalgia to say that we evolved for something very different.
Our Evolutionary Blueprint
As Yuval Noah Harari describes in Sapiens, Homo sapiens spent almost 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers living in small, interdependent communities. These societies were social, egalitarian, present-focused, and surprisingly balanced in terms of labor and leisure. Anthropological studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups suggest that people worked about 20 to 30 hours a week to secure food, with the remaining time devoted to socializing, resting, or creative pursuits. It was not a life of constant toil, but one attuned to rhythms: seasonal, emotional, relational. Survival was communal, not individual.
As Robert Sapolsky explores in Behave, this environment didn’t just shape our way of life—it selected for the traits that helped us thrive within it. The human brain, particularly its older structures—what we sometimes call the “reptilian” and “mammalian” systems—evolved to meet the demands of this context. We were designed for a world of immediacy, where attention, emotional resonance, and social bonds were essential to staying alive. Even when hierarchies existed, they were flexible and relational, grounded in context and contribution rather than status or dominance. The key point is this: for the vast majority of our species’ history, our internal wiring was well-matched to the external world.
This balance worked for millennia. But then we adapted.
Too Clever For Our Own Good
Adaptation is our species’ greatest strength. Long before we built civilizations, we built habits, stories, and strategies. We didn’t just survive harsh environments—we reshaped them. We made tools, tamed fire, organized into tribes. We learned to adjust not just to our surroundings, but to each other. Our adaptability made us specialists, explorers, and problem-solvers.
But every adaptation comes with trade-offs. To adapt is to change—not just externally, but internally. We don’t remain untouched by what we adjust to; our minds, bodies, and relationships shift in response. Sometimes this leads to innovation and flourishing. Other times, it creates mismatches between what we need and what we now live with.
This paradox is at the heart of the modern human condition: our ability to reshape the world has outpaced our biology’s ability to keep up. We evolve slowly, biologically speaking, but our environments have transformed at a breakneck pace—through agriculture, industry, capitalism, and now digital and algorithmic life. Each shift has required new forms of adaptation, but not always the kind that align with our well-being.
This tension—between what we are wired for and what we are asked to endure—is relatively new in our species’ history. It began the moment we started transforming our external world in ways our internal systems weren’t designed for.
The first major rupture? Well, according to Jared Diamond it was “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.”
Agriculture: Leveling the Field
Agriculture was our first great environmental transformation. It shifted our survival model from interdependence to independence, from sharing to storing, from fluid relationships to defined roles. Where community had once been the currency of survival, ownership—and with it, hierarchy—began to emerge. In the pre-agricultural era, if someone fell ill or was injured, their survival didn’t depend on personal wealth or productivity—it depended on the community’s willingness to care for one another. These were interdependent networks, not meritocracies. A child’s worth wasn’t tied to future earnings potential; an elder’s value wasn’t measured in whether or not they could still contribute. Everyone belonged.
But agriculture changed that. Once we settled and began producing surplus food, the seeds of hierarchy were planted—both literally and metaphorically. Land became something to own, and ownership created inequality. Those who had more land had more power. Roles shifted from relational to functional—no longer “How can I help the group survive?” but “What do I produce?” Usefulness became a measure of social worth.
As land ownership concentrated, so too did power and opportunity. Rulers emerged. Priesthoods formed. Class systems solidified. The egalitarian fabric of human society gave way to stratification. Where once a person’s standing in the group was fluid—based on contribution, wisdom, or generosity—now it was fixed, determined by birthright or influence over resources.
The surplus that allowed for technological advances and cultural flourishing also laid the groundwork for social disconnection and systemic inequality.
But agriculture was just the first domino.
The Industrial Revolution: Trapped in Time
Fast forward several millennia to the Industrial Revolution, and the gap between human nature and human systems widened dramatically. If agriculture shifted us from relational living to roles and hierarchies, the Industrial Revolution reinforced that shift with machinery, schedules, and jobs.
For the first time in human history, large numbers of people moved away from the land, away from extended family networks and tight-knit communities, into urban centers built around factories and mechanized labor. The rhythms of the natural world—seasons, daylight, weather—were replaced by the relentless tick of the factory clock.
More than just usefulness, productivity became the defining measure of human worth. Time was money, and people were valued for their efficiency, not their relationships or wisdom. The human body itself was treated like a machine—something to be optimized, disciplined, and worked to exhaustion. As historian E.P. Thompson wrote in his seminal essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” the factory system didn’t just organize labor—it reorganized human consciousness around punctuality, discipline, and “the clock.”
This wasn’t just about economics. It was about identity. A farmer’s identity was connected to land, seasons, and family; a factory worker’s identity was tied to their output.
Families fragmented. Communities thinned. Where once survival depended on mutual aid, now it depended on wages. Your value wasn’t who you were to others, but what you could efficiently produce for your employer.
Capitalism: Everything Has a Cost
If agriculture gave us surplus, and the Industrial Revolution gave us efficiency, capitalism turned both into a way of life. It didn’t just change how we work—it changed how we understand ourselves.
Suddenly, everything became a transaction—not just land or labor, but time, attention, even care. As sociologist Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation, markets didn’t stay confined to the economy—they expanded into spaces once shaped by tradition, reciprocity, and shared responsibility. Parenting became outcome-driven, friendship a calendar entry, and community became your “network.”
This was more than just an economic shift. It was psychological.
Our sense of identity morphed—from participants in mutual care to consumers navigating endless options. What we owned began to speak louder than what we offered. And as this transactional mindset deepened, even our obligations became internalized. The anthropologist David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, argued that modern indebtedness isn’t merely financial—it’s moral. We didn’t just owe money; we came to feel we owed ourselves—not just to creditors, but to employers, institutions, and a culture that equated worth with output. In this world, the pressure to be productive, to accumulate, and even to borrow became a kind of moral imperative—an invisible weight pressing down on our worthiness, even in moments meant for rest.
By the end of the capitalist transformation, we didn’t just live differently—we had become different. Agriculture captured us from the wild. Industrialization caged us, reshaping our rhythms, disciplining our time, taming our instincts. And capitalism? It finished the job.
In this shift, something quieter slipped away—a sense of self rooted in relationship, in presence, in being. It was here—more than any era before—that we began to lose touch with what made us most human. It commodified not just our labor, but our longings. It rewired how we measure meaning. By this point, no one remembered what it was like to live in the open. We still looked like Homo sapiens—upright, clever, social—but something essential had dimmed. We were born in captivity. And like animals bred in enclosures for generations, we could no longer survive without the systems that confined us.
The Digital Age: Paying (for) Attention
Then came the digital age. If the Industrial Revolution mechanized labor and capitalism commodified life, the digital era virtualized it. Our attention—once a survival tool tuned to subtle changes in our environment—is now a commodity, harvested and sold. Platforms are engineered to exploit our neural wiring through variable rewards, infinite scroll, and algorithmic nudges. As former Google ethicist Tristan Harris puts it, we live in an “attention economy,” where the most valuable resource isn’t oil—it’s engagement.
But our brains weren’t built for infinite novelty. What once helped us detect a predator is now triggered by every ping, swipe, and notification. We are overwhelmed—not by threat, but by urgency designed to feel important. This constant stimulation doesn’t just distract us—it changes us.
Because once our attention became the commodity, everything else began to shift: intimacy, presence, the very cues we rely on to feel seen and safe.
We evolved for real-time connection—physical touch, mutual gaze, micro-moments of regulation. But digital communication, by design, is asynchronous and disembodied. It severs the loop of feedback that grounds us. Where presence once meant a warm glance or mirrored laughter, it now means typing dots, emoji reactions, and delayed replies across a fragmented timeline.
Barbara Fredrickson, in Love 2.0, defines love not as grand emotion but as shared resonance: time spent together, physical presence, and mutual responsiveness. These are not abstract concepts—they are biological regulators. They anchor our nervous systems. But in the digital sphere, the signals don’t land. They scatter. We scroll curated lives, multitask our way through conversations, and confuse activity for connection.
Esther Perel calls this “artificial intimacy”—a performance of closeness that mimics real connection without ever fully delivering it. We text, comment, like, react—but the mutuality is gone. And the saddest part is: we’ve gotten used to it. It’s not just that the connection is shallow—it’s that we’ve stopped expecting depth. We’ve acclimated to the illusion, mistaking the simulation for the real thing. In adapting to the digital world, we didn’t just lose intimacy—we lost our memory of what it once felt like.
Even time has unraveled. Natural rhythms—sunlight, seasons, shared meals—once gave our lives shape. Now, we move through a culture of around-the-clock responsiveness. In the time you’ve spent reading this, how many notifications have you “missed”? But even then—did you really miss anything? Or are we caught in a system that demands attention without offering fulfillment?
With every adaptation—from fields to factories to feeds—we moved further from the rhythms that made us human. In this digital habitat, the walls aren’t physical—they’re perceptual. Notifications, nudges, and fragmented schedules stretch our time, diffuse our presence, and filter the depth of what we see.
We are no longer adapting to nature. We are adapting to carefully engineered environments that imitate the wild but exist only within the enclosures we’ve built.
The Next Great Adaptation
Perhaps the cruelest cost of progress is the illusion that because we’ve survived, we must be thriving. But not being sick and healthiness are not the same thing. We’ve adapted—consistently and at times brilliantly—but each breakthrough has come with trade-offs we rarely foresaw until the damage was done.
We are not starving. We are not hunted. We are not dying young. But we are tired in ways sleep can’t fix. Lonely in ways social media can’t soothe. Unwell in a system that tells us we should be fine.
This is the condition of the zoo.
We built it for safety, for comfort, for control. And in some ways, it worked. We are housed, fed, connected, entertained. But like animals kept in enclosures designed to mimic a world they can no longer survive in, we often pace—restless, dysregulated, disconnected from instincts we barely remember. The tragedy isn’t just that we’re confined. It’s that we’ve confused the enclosure for our natural state.
And we can’t simply tear it down. Like the animals we’ve domesticated, we have lost the ability to return to the wild unchanged. Our nervous systems, our relationships, our daily lives—they are shaped by this environment. To pretend we can abandon it wholesale is wishful thinking.
But here is where hope lives: adaptation is not just how we got here—it’s how we find our way forward.
What we need now is not a return to the past, but a reckoning with it. The unintended harms of our previous adaptations are painfully clear in hindsight:
Agriculture promised ease—but brought hierarchy and labor beyond our biological limits.
Industrialization promised efficiency—but turned human beings into inputs in a machine.
The digital age promised immediacy and abundance—but left us overstimulated, underslept, and emotionally ambivalent—satiated but not satisfied.
And now, another revolution looms—artificial intelligence—arriving with the familiar promises of convenience, productivity, and progress. It echoes every shift before it: reflective of our human brilliance, but also blind to what it might cost us in rhythm, connection, and meaning. So we face a choice: will we repeat the pattern? Or will we finally adapt with our whole selves in mind?
To do that, we need something like rewilding—not a retreat to the past, but a reorientation. A way of remembering the kinds of environments our minds and bodies are still shaped for: those built on attunement, presence, relationship, and depth. It’s not about escaping the zoo. It’s about redesigning it. Making space for slowness. For care. For coherence.
We can’t dismantle the zoo. But we can stop mistaking it for a paradise. We can acknowledge what it costs us, and start building spaces—both literal and psychological—that restore our sense of being fully human inside it.
Because the point is not to adapt more quickly. It’s to adapt more wisely.
And wisdom means asking not just can we build it, but will it help us thrive—not just now, but in the long run? If we’ve shaped environments that unintentionally hurt us, we can shape new ones that purposefully heal us.