A Crisis of Mattering

We feel alienated and dissatisfied because our world has grown too big

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For billions of people around the world, life has been perfected. We have food, clean water, shelter, warmth and elaborate systems of protection that take care of us when we fall sick or fail. We live in freedom, not tyranny, and sleep in comfortable beds with entertainment everywhere. From the perspective of the humans of 10,000 years ago or 1,000 years ago or 200 years ago, we are living the lives of gods. Truly, in 2025, we have created a heaven on earth for the masses.

But we are not happy.

What is that restless yearning we bring with us on the routines of our days? Heavy yet empty, it gnaws, a species of hunger, something dissatisfied. It’s not always there. I notice mine mainly on the ordinary days which, by definition, are most of them; sometimes distant, sometimes crushing, never far away.

This ordinary-day ache is a first world problem. That’s not a way to blithely demean it; it is the point. Most of us, in the West, are not mentally ill. We’re not going to go the doctor complaining of our dull, yearning ache. It’s not going to show up in official health statistics. But it’s there. From a distance it looks as if we, the people of the market economies, are thriving. We work and we play and we have everything we need to survive into old age, and for our children to survive beyond us.

But we are not happy.

We are not happy because we’re hunter-gatherers living in a runaway environment that fails to provide us with sufficient amounts of some of life’s essential elements.

And we are still hunter-gatherers. Humans spent at least 100,000 generations living in small, mobile groups, and it’s in these groups in which we evolved. We only started settling down at the dawn of agriculture, about 500 generations ago. Our brains haven’t had the chance to catch up with our spectacularly altered circumstances. We feel modern, but are driven by Stone Age neural technology and still need Stone Age things.

This is evident in many of our emotions, needs and preferences that remain those of our forager ancestors. Why do we feel so cold, for so much of the year, in Britain? Why are we so ill-adapted to the natural conditions of this island? Because we are apes that evolved in a warm African climate, and our bodies are designed to dissipate heat. The features of East Africa’s landscape – our shared ancestral environment – haunt us, and are craved universally by modern people. Humans still find aesthetically beautiful the sight of locations that promise food and water, with just enough vegetation that advancing predators can be spotted. In one study, participants from three cultures were shown various pictures of trees and all showed a strong preference for the same type – “those forming a moderately dense canopy and trunks that separated in two near the ground” – that would have featured in the African Savannah and would have provided refuge from the midday sun and been easy to climb to escape danger. And there was no shortage of danger, back then, from long-extinct hunters of humans including sabre-toothed tigers, 200 kilogram hyenas, eagles with wingspans of twenty-three feet and “man-eating bear-dog hybrids”. Still today our sleeping preferences are designed for maximum safety from nighttime predators: humans choose to sleep with their beds against a back wall, in a position in which they can see the door whilst being as far away from it as possible.

All of which is to say, don’t underestimate your Stone-Ageness. It is real, and it is a huge part of how we think, feel and behave. And, crucially, it is specialised for a much smaller mode of life than we experience today. By modern standards, our social reality back then was unimaginably tiny. The number often quoted as the size of our ancestral tribes is 150, but this would have included the wider group, with whom our association was relatively sporadic. Day-to-day life, for well over 95 per cent of our existence on this planet, was spent in the company of between 25 and 35 people.

And our social reality was everything. Humans are a species of ultra-social ape – a unique kind of chimpanzee-ant crossbreed – that solved the problems of survival by working together in highly-cooperative groups. To make this work, our brains evolved powerful drives that urge us to form collaborative relationships with others: we yearn to connect with people, and earn status from them, which is a sign that we’re proving valuable to the collaborative relationship. Experiences of connection and status are universally pursued and treasured by humans. They’re critical signals that we’re living safe and successful lives. Without these signals, the brain senses we’re in danger and we became mentally unwell – suffering anxiety, depression and even becoming suicidal – and also physically ill. Humans who feel chronically isolated and deprived of status get sick more easily and die earlier.

In the forager camps of our long evolutionary past, these essential social nutrients would have been relatively easy to come by. We would have had to maintain secure connection with just a few dozen souls. We would have competed for status with even fewer people than this, as men competed mostly with men, and women mostly with women. Status would have been earned with modest acts of virtue, courage, toil and competence. Whilst status hierarchies existed, they were typically extremely shallow, with leadership roles being adopted temporarily and by consensus. What we think of today as ‘status anxiety’ was not, for them, an ordinary experience.

And yet they felt good about themselves. It’s thought that pre-modern tribes often believed themselves to be at the centre of the world, with many telling themselves a self-aggrandising story that said they were the greatest of all, the only true humans. For the Wari tribe of the Amazon Basin ‘Wari’ meant ‘human beings’, all outsiders being other and lesser; the Hadza of East Africa likewise call themselves ‘the people’, with the word ‘haza’ meaning ‘human being’. The anthropologist Mervyn Meggitt was told by a member of an Aboriginal band in Central Australia that, “There are two kinds of blackfellows, we who are the Walbiri and those unfortunate people who are not. Our laws are the true laws; other blackfellows have inferior laws which they continuously break.”

Of course, life in this era was terrible for many reasons: it could be brutally violent, with capital punishment thought to be universal; child mortality was around 50 percent; average life expectancy was around 33 years old. I make no claim that we were more (or less) happy, back then, in general. The point is simply that, for millions of years, we’d have probably felt as if the role we played in the greatest tribe in the world was valuable, even essential. We mattered.

And then, over the past 11,000 years or so, this changed. As the world got bigger, our importance shrank. We began to matter less.

It all started when we settled down into villages – and then towns, and then cities, and then nations. Over the last 500 generations, our groups have become remorselessly larger. The first ‘megasocieties’, populated by people with different languages, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds, appeared at around 3,000 BC. With them arrived ‘big gods’, all-seeing moralising deities who were at the head of vast religions in which individual humans played status games, not with a a handful of close camp-mates, but with untold numbers of strangers, earning karma for the next life or a passage to heaven. In late medieval Europe, a “widespread and morbid” sense of ”salvation anxiety” gripped much of the Christian world, as the population worried if they’d done enough on earth to gain access to paradise and avoid the eternal fires of hell. Then, in England, in the early 1700s, the ‘job’ was invented. Once, most people worked when work was needed. Now began a life of continual employment in forges, mills and factories. Here was an existence, brand new to our species, that was defined by tightly controlled routines, bounded by regular shifts and rewarded with regular pay. Individual workers became easily replaceable parts in a massive machine.

Today, when we’re still so young we’ve barely had the chance to register we’re alive, we’re pushed into an education system in which our value is measured regularly and precisely and is policed by rotating teams of elders. Every year we ascend to a new level of the game in which the challenges become harder and our claim to status more fragile, until we’re thrown up into the even tougher game of employment, where our perceived worth is directly connected to our ability to make an acceptable life for ourselves and our loved ones. In adulthood we have to maintain connection and status with relatively massive numbers of collaborators, with the distances between the bottom and the top of our hierarchies overwhelmingly vast. Many of the companies that employ us are global in scale. Sixty-nine of the hundred largest economies on earth today are not nations but corporations. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, the technology company Apple made more money than the annual GDP of 135 countries; its market valuation was higher than the GDP of Italy, Brazil, Canada, South Korea and Russia.

Modern Western humans exist in a panopticon of CCTV cameras, smartphones and Ring doorbells, electronic eyes everywhere, always watching, always recording, full colour motion-picture records of our behaviour laid down on hard drives to be used against us if we err. We work in crowds and we travel home in crowds and we sleep surrounded by crowds of sleeping people. Population densities today are up to 100,000 times greater than they were in our forager past. Such dense living has been linked to lower life satisfaction. “Especially high densities may indicate to psychological mechanisms assessing competition and resources that the environment is intensely competitive for very limited natural resources.”

As we’ve learned, one of the essential resources we compete for is status. Humans are naturally driven to display signs of their status to others. In a hunter-gatherer tribe, a successful hunter might wear a necklace of teeth, or decorate his dwelling with skulls; in today’s world, much of what even the poorest among us choose to spend our money on are the modern equivalents of those skulls and teeth. But status is relative: the more of it that people around us display, the less we feel we have. Their demonstrations of status trigger in us a powerful subconscious need to catch up, keep up, and go faster. They make us yearn and worry and ache.

And it’s not just their cars, clothes, jewellery, holidays and smart houses that needle us. Virtue is a form of status, and one of our most powerful needs is to be considered morally good, and so we worry about our goodness and whether it’s good enough. Popularity is another way we measure status. Beauty is another. One horrendous study found that brief exposure to just ten attractive female faces reduced “self-perceived desirability” in women and made men less satisfied with their long-term partners. Competence is another. On traditional and social media and in the streets of our towns and cities, we’re bombarded with visions of actors, musicians, athletes, artists, CEOs, comedians, chefs, influencers and activists who are among the best in the world. For millions of years we’d have never encountered, let alone measured ourselves against, such bewilderingly exceptional people. Today, they never leave us alone.

We’re programmed to want to feel as if our existence is important, even essential. For millions of years, it likely would have been. But in the modern West, how often do we feel indispensable? And why is this? For the psychologist Professor Michael Tomasello, ”one of the most robust findings in all the social sciences is that cooperation becomes more difficult as group size increases.” The most important reason for this is, “the diminishing proportional contribution of each individual (my contribution matters less, so why bother?)”. This, I believe, is the heart of the problem. There is a terrible mismatch between our evolved brains that remain specialised for social life in small groups, and the colossal world we’re born into. This mismatch means that, in some deep subconscious way, we sense we don’t really matter. It’s this chronic deficit of mattering that makes us ache.

Think of it as ‘identity stress’. The brain monitors the health of our identity by measuring our supplies of connection and status. It looks out for threats to these essential social nutrients, and opportunities to gain more. When connection and status are in poor supply, or moving down rather than up, or even threatening to move down, we experience distress.

In the modern West, identity stress is how we live. The market economy wants us to suffer from identity stress: it’s how we become regular customers and hard workers and loyal users. We’re surrounded by screens and posters and window displays that rain upon us subconscious signals that we’re not good enough, and that if we only buy this product, or become this wealthy, or become this type of socially-approved person with this appearance, living in this type of home, that we’ll be more loved and more valued – that we will matter more.

But it never works. We toil and we diet and we curate our appearance and design our lifestyle and edit our beliefs and we bend our personality into the shape we think the world wants, and we achieve this and then that and then the next thing and the next thing.

And we are not happy.

This is not a conspiracy. It might be narratively satisfying to blame capitalists and tech bros as if they’re calculating cartoon villains, but none of them plotted to create our crisis of mattering. The West was made inch by inch by ambitious, experimenting individuals who led groups that played status games. The more successful their games became, the bigger they grew, and the more the practical problems of our existence became solved. Until we ended up here.

Here. I write to you at 16.14 on the 13th June 2025 in room 419 of the Premier Inn in Sheffield, England. I am sitting in front of my laptop eating a Gregg’s sausage roll and drinking a Gregg’s Fairtrade Apple Juice. 3.8 billion years of evolution, with an unbroken chain of connection between me and a single celled bacterium swimming in ooze at the dawn of life on earth has led me here, to a small fourth floor room built by capitalists that has three beds crammed into it, and there are shining stains of fat on the paper bag that says BAG SOME JOY on it and there is a plastic kettle with two clean mugs and four individually wrapped PG Tips tea-bags for my enjoyment and there is a television on the wall for my entertainment. Tomorrow I will speak to some Humanists at a Humanist conference and I don’t know what a Humanist is or what the Humanists want from me. I am tired and my heart hurts and I ache and I am well fed and I am well watered and I have three beds. Later I will head out into the city and a Starbucks server named Lara will call me ‘love’ and ‘darling’ and she will not look me in the eye. I will walk through the Friday night summer streets and the bars and the clubs and the restaurants will be filled with restless Friday night people and the girls will look like sex and the boys will look like violence and they all, more than anything, want to feel that they matter, they matter, they matter, and they will feel that way, and then they won’t.