There has never been an easier time to be a human being. And yet many of us still feel dissatisfied.

We navigate our days with the accumulated knowledge of humanity instantly accessible from a small device that fits inside our pockets.

We shop in giant halls packed to the ceiling with mountains of food, spices, drinks and delicacies gathered from every corner of the earth.

At home we switch on boxes of lights and sound that beam the finest entertainment ever produced straight into our living rooms – so spoiled by the number of options that we struggle to choose how to amuse ourselves.

And yet, despite living at the easiest time in human history to survive and meet our material needs, we still feel unsatisfied.

There is something cold and empty gnawing at the core of us. No amount of consumption or technology can put it to rest.

And while we struggle to name the feeling, we sense that something vital is missing.

For our ancestors, daily survival was an uncertainty. Food was hunted or gathered, often at great effort and risk. Entertainment was a story round a camp fire. Information spread slowly – when you stumbled across a neighbouring tribe.

That something is what I call the Gap.

An Ancient Species

For thousands of years, we evolved to survive in a world that was wild, physical, and immediate. Where only simple tools and the strength of our wits were the difference between survival and certain death.

Then, in the blink of an evolutionary eye, everything changed. In only a few hundred generations, modern technology transformed our environment completely.

Today we live in a world our ancestors would barely recognise. We are an ancient species living in a modern – and very alien – environment.

The Problem

The central problem of modern civilisation is not poverty, war, or politics. It is the growing distance between human nature and the world we have built.

The Gap is the widening chasm between our palaeolithic needs and the blistering pace of technological progress.

Technology, we once believed, solves problems. But it also creates them. Each powerful new invention reshapes the world that humans live in.

The written word weakened the need for memory.

The combustion engine ended thousands of years of reliance on horses.

Every technological leap changes the environment we inhabit. And each change subtly reshapes the conditions under which human beings must live.

The Psychological Effect

When the environment changes faster than human nature can adapt, the consequences appear everywhere.

It begins as exhilaration: a sense of the novelty of power. Suddenly things that once required effort now arrive instantly. For a brief moment the hunger is fed and the thirst is quenched. Pleasure arrives. But the joy fades as quickly as it arrived and all that is left is an emptiness – a quiet sense that what we’ve just enjoyed will never quite be enough.

The new pair of shoes from Amazon. The fancy new iPhone. Twenty-two likes on Instagram.

We get what we want quickly but without the sense of where the getting came from.

The effect produces a cycle of strange behaviour. An addictive never-ending chase – like a dog on a treadmill, where the butcher’s meat is always slightly out of reach.

The Social Consequences

When you scale this up to a society, the consequences become profound.

The old ways of living – the rituals, the traditions, and the institutions that once bound us together – can no longer cope with the pace of change. Our days are full of abstract interactions with glowing screens and we forget a simple truth: that before we have eaten our breakfast, we’ve relied on several billion people.

Our convenience is paid for with abstraction.

Our personalised lives come at the cost of disconnection.

We substitute our creative powers for quick fixes and easy solutions.

The Challenge

The modern world is a remarkable achievement. It has conquered distance, disease, and scarcity. But the speed of change has left a void.

The Gap is the distance between our ancient nature and our modern environment.

Bridging it will be the great challenge of the twenty-first century.

The question that remains is older than civilisation itself: what is the best way for a human being to live?

The answer will not be found in more technology, more consumption, or more speed. It will be found in our ability to mediate between our deepest needs and the world that we have created.

In learning how an ancient species can live well in a modern world.