To solve the human ↔ environment alignment problem.

Humans evolved into their current form about 200,000 years ago. We’re still evolving, but we are very much still the same animals that roamed the savannahs and hunted mammoths. We’re built for a world where we managed only a few dozen relationships and chased animals to survive.

Meanwhile, we’re expected to remember thousands of names and faces, learn multiple languages, and organize thousands of to-do list tasks while sitting behind two dimensional screens. We’ve only spent about 2.5% of our modern existence organizing into complex social hierarchies and controlling our environment more than our environment has controlled us. Our bodies and brains did not evolve to handle modern society, and all of our needs stem from this issue.

I believe there are two approaches to solving this, and both are important:

Minimalist Approaches

Going back to the basics:

• Minimalism - reducing the amount of options and information that we have to process. Muji is popular for a reason.
• Nature - making our environment more similar to what our minds and bodies evolved for. Statistics show that nature has powerful calming effects.
• Small Communities - humans evolved in small groups of < 150 individuals, and research shows that humans still work best in small groups around this size.

Expansionist Approaches

Creating tools to help us navigate the modern world better:

• Information Tools - Wikipedia, Notion, Linear, Figma, etc - help us organize information in ways that we can’t handle with just our brains alone.
• Relationship Tools - Social Networks, CRMs, etc - make it possible to exponentially increase the number of relationships we can keep track of.
• Education Tools - Duolingo, Coursera, etc - make it possible to learn far more information, far more quickly than we could using more primitive techniques.
• Health Tools - modern health tech enables us to live far longer and age more slowly than we naturally could.