Why Do We Find Modern Life So Hard?

Navigating the paradox of progress and well-being

Something is wrong in modern life. We're experiencing levels of safety and security that our ancestors would have found unfathomable. According to Statista, the rate of violent crime in the United States fell by almost half from 1990 to 2022. That's not an anomaly; as Harvard University professor of psychology Steven Pinker notes in Better Angels of Our Nature, crime of all kinds has been falling for centuries. We experience far less rape, murder, and robbery than did our ancestors. We're also much less likely to die in war. While the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tragic, it's also a far cry from the continent-spanning conflicts of centuries past, like the Thirty Years War or the Napoleonic Wars.

Similarly, we're experiencing a level of material prosperity that our ancestors could only dream of. According to economic historians at the Maddison Project Database, from around 1 CE to 1800 CE, the annual real (or inflation-adjusted) income per person was under $2,000. By 2016, that number in the United States was a comparatively staggering $53,015. Life expectancy for most of human history was around 30 years; in the United States, life expectancy in 2022 was 76.1 years. We even work fewer hours than people even a century ago. 

And yet, in spite of our historical levels of privilege, many of us are miserable. Over 40 million people in the United States suffer from an anxiety disorder. 47 million Americans suffer from depression. As Dr. Alok Kanojia, a psychiatrist at Harvard University, puts it when describing modern life, "Life just seems to be squeezing everyone dry."

What's going on? Why are we struggling so much to cope with the demands of modern life, even though those demands are lighter than anything our ancestors had to contend with? Our ancestors slew dragons on a daily basis; why are we struggling to beat back chihuahuas?

The truth is that humans evolved specific powerful ways to cope with the world. Our ancestors used these to great effect to thrive in conditions of intense danger and poverty. Over the past several decades, most of our society has accidentally turned away from these ways.

In order to cope with negative experiences, we need two things: time and mental space. We need idle time, in which our hands might be occupied but our minds are not, in order to let our minds simply process whatever has happened to us. Here's how Dr. Kanojia describes it: "[emotional] processing is actually…a subconscious or relatively automatic activity that…happens over long periods of time." This is a very powerful process and can help folks to work through brutal experiences. 

In ages past, humans had lots of idle time. We fished, sharpened spears, tended fires, repaired nets, and performed other physical activities that kept our hands busy while leaving our minds free to process the events of the day. By contrast, in the modern world, we have little to no idle time. Every spare minute is filled with distractions: we listen to podcasts, read books, text friends, and check social media ten thousand times per day. As a result, we never actually process our emotions and work through them. Dr. Kanojia describes this phenomenon using an example of a bad date:

"Let's say I have a bad date. What I end up doing immediately after the bad date…is distract myself and then what happens is—as I distract myself—I don't process any of those emotions. They kind of just go dormant…as this goes on again and again and again what we tend to see is that our life is filled with negative impacts that we don't allow ourselves time to actually process."

As humans, we're designed to be very resilient; but a primary mechanism of that resilience is giving ourselves idle time in which to process our emotions. In the absence of that idle time, we start to feel very fragile. As Dr. Kanojia puts it, we experience "death by a thousand cuts." He says he works with a lot of people who "as they try to move through life, they're just getting more and more shriveled and kind of patched up and defunct." Or, as he sums it up, "We're not able to recover from things the way that we used to."

It's not just lack of idle time that's handicapping our ability to cope with life's challenges. Sebastian Junger is a war correspondent who spent time on the front lines of the Afghanistan conflict. In a piece for Vanity Fair titled "How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield," he points out that chronic PTSD was rare in pre-modern societies. "Ethnographic studies on hunter-gatherer societies rarely turn up evidence of chronic PTSD among their warriors," he writes, "and oral histories of Native American warfare consistently fail to mention psychological trauma." Even fifty years ago, reports of PTSD were relatively low among soldiers. But modern soldiers experience high rates of PTSD; as of 2015, he notes, fully half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans applied for disability. As Junger puts it: "They return from wars that are safer than those their fathers and grandfathers fought, and yet far greater numbers of them wind up alienated and depressed."

What's driving this increase in PTSD among modern soldiers? Junger chalks it up to changes in modern society. We evolved as hunter-gatherers; we lived in small communal tribes where we worked, hunted, and slept surrounded by our fellows. That communal experience is common for soldiers, who live in tight-knit platoons and have to rely on their brothers for their daily survival. By contrast, modern civilian society in the United States is isolationist and atomistic. Most of us are lonely; according to an Advisory by the Surgeon General, "In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness." Even those of us with spouses and close friend networks don't experience the deep web of social connection that hunter-gatherers—or many soldiers on active duty—experience.

Leaving a close-knit platoon to return to a society where a "strong support network" might mean a few friends that you see once per week can be jarring. According to anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz, "Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that." 

The alienating effects of modern society can even prevent recovery after a traumatic event. Junger describes an experiment with lab rats in which a rat is traumatized by an attack by a larger rat. The smaller rat, who was frightened but not injured, generally recovered within 48 hours—unless it was kept in isolation. As Junger puts it, "The ones that are kept apart from other rats are the only ones that develop long-term traumatic symptoms." Our veterans spend years overseas in the kind of dense social web that we evolved to thrive in, and then return to a society that feels utterly isolating by contrast. No wonder so many of them experience long-term PTSD.

It's not just veterans who suffer from this alienation, of course. Many Americans experience trauma of some kind. We evolved to heal from that trauma; but when our mechanism for healing (social connection) is hijacked, we shouldn't be surprised when people start to seem more fragile. 

We see the same story in conflict resolution. We have a lot of conflict in our society. According to a 2021 study by the American Enterprise Institute,15 percent of American adults have ended a relationship over politics. 40-50 percent of first marriages end in divorce (and the numbers are even higher for second marriages). And a quick glance at Twitter will reveal that, when it comes to conflict, we're bursting at the seams.

Partly, this is because we don't process our emotions, so they keep bubbling out of us in unpleasant ways. But part of it is that we rarely take advantage of how our bodies were designed to work through conflict.

In his book The Way Out, Columbia University professor of psychology Peter T. Coleman notes that when we have conflict with someone, we normally sit down to hash it out. But this is suboptimal; in fact, it's much more productive to physically move with the person. As Coleman reports, "physically moving in sync with others has been shown to enhance cooperation, prosocial behavior, and the ability to achieve joint goals, and it also increases our compassion and helping behavior." "One study," he said, even "showed that walking in sync with a group of people made them more willing to make personal sacrifices that benefited the group."

When you have conflict with someone, taking a walk or even going for a run with them can be a much more powerful way to get back to peace than simply sitting down with them. Our bodies evolved to move. When we ignore this and assume that our thoughts and our words are the only things that matter, we shouldn't be surprised when conflict starts to feel endemic and unfixable.

Another way to reduce conflict is to take some time away from the conflict to breathe. As psychologist Chris Ferguson explained to us in an interview, doing this can help us to calm down and not fly off the handle at small conflicts. Ferguson explains that "there are two related issues here…emotional responses usually peak immediately after a stressor, then lessen with time, and, second, emotional responses tend to impair problem-solving." "Thus," he argues, "you see people have a bad emotional response, impulsively do something stupid, only to later acknowledge how stupid it was." When we pause and take time to process, we can "evaluate if the situation is really as bad as we initially thought it was" and calibrate our response from there. Again, this is something that most of our ancestors did very easily; in a relatively slow-paced society, you have a lot of time to breathe when it comes to addressing (non-violent) conflict. But in our hyper-online age, we're far more used to experiencing a stimulus (for example, a tweet we don't like) and immediately reacting. That's a formula for conflict escalation that our ancestors rarely had to deal with.

This rejection of our biology and the rhythms for which we evolved is having damaging effects on our psyches. But even more concerning is its erosion of our civic society.

For most of American history, the United States has been characterized by the strong bonds of civic association. In his book Democracy In America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the United States was unique in terms of our willingness to band together to form private organizations in order to address problems. In the 20th century, these organizations included religious groups, bowling leagues, charitable organizations, interest groups, trade unions, and more. They bound us together in a tight web of interpersonal associations that helped us feel connected to the world and to our neighbors.

The problem with human connection, though, is that it's inherently risky. If you go on a date, you might find true love…or you might get rejected. If you join a bowling league with your neighbors, you might find a much-needed sense of community…or you might feel humiliated by your low score or hurt by something that another league member said (whether or not their statement was intended to be hurtful). Our ancestors were able to shrug off this risk and deal with the rough-and-tumble of human interaction because they used the powerful strategies that our biology and evolution gave us. But because we've turned away from these strategies, human interaction has started to feel substantially more dangerous. When we stop processing our emotions, we stop recovering from interactions that might rub us the wrong way. We move away from seeing these annoyances as a minor irritant and the small price of human connection and start to experience death by a thousand cuts.

This trend is most pronounced among younger generations, who are more prone to living online and more cut off from in-person connection and physical movement. Is it any wonder that 73% of Gen Z’ers (age 18-22) report "sometimes or always feeling alone?" Or that 63% percent of men aged 18 to 29 are single, according to Pew Research? More and more young people are deciding that IRL social relationships are too risky for them because they've never been taught the coping mechanisms that our bodies and evolution gave us.

The rejection of these coping mechanisms also poses dangers for our republic. Our republic requires that people come together to debate and discuss ideas. As governmental systems go, this is pretty rough-and-tumble. It requires that we engage with people in good faith who might disagree with us or even believe that decisions we have made should be illegal. When we take time to process our emotions, this engagement is highly doable. But when we neglect to do so, these conversations start to feel riskier. We have trouble coping with opposing views and are more likely to stew and ruminate on the perceived awfulness of those views to our psychological detriment. This is made worse by the fact that more people are carrying around a lot of bottled-up anger and frustration, looking to vent it on someone else. We're all getting more angry at the same time that we're getting more sensitive, which is not a recipe for productive conversations. In the absence of these productive conversations, we may find that people lose their appetite for democracy.

This isn't hypothetical. Again, the problems that we've identified in this piece are most acute among younger Americans. And young Americans are indeed losing faith in democracy. Only 59 percent of Americans aged 18-25 agree that "Democracy may have problems, but it is the best system of government" (compared to 74 percent of Americans as a whole). 

So what can we do to ameliorate the malaise of modern society and get back to the emotional peace and well-being that our ancestors experienced? One key is to get back into the rhythms from which we evolved. Cultivate idle time. Develop a closer circle of friends, and spend more time in person with other human beings rather than trying to connect through a keyboard (as far as our evolved brains are concerned, the latter is mostly pseudo-connection anyway). If you're in conflict with someone else, get together in person and physically move through it. Once we start working with our biology instead of against it, we might be surprised at how much better we, and our society as a whole, start to feel.

Another key is to stop letting ourselves be artificially divided into in-groups and out-groups. Illiberal attitudes towards race and gender can certainly contribute to us not interacting as often or as deeply with people who have superficial differences (for example, college students are warned to avoid an ever-increasing list of microaggressions when interacting with someone of a different race or gender, some of which are just basic get-to-know-you questions). But we can choose to not fall into these divides to instead recognize another core component of our biology, which is that we are all one human species and that our differences are dwarfed by our similarities. If we do that, we might all feel a little bit less lonely.

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