Despite a parabolic curve of scientific and technological achievement, many factors crucial to the individual and collective state of human beings seem to be adrift and disintegrating. Our smartphones get smarter every year ... but can we say the same for ourselves?

The chapter opens by cataloguing the paradox of progress. By every metric that should matter, technology, medicine, communication, knowledge, we should be living in a golden age. Instead:

It does seem that we are becoming incrementally more unhealthy … physically, mentally, and socially. Elections come and go, governments change, hopes are raised and then dashed. History repeats, the national debt continues to grow, and we keep pushing on as if we are one step away from returning to a golden age … one we have forgotten how to reach.

Apocalypse Roulette

I trace my common personal journey through decades of existential threat:

I was born a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis; a tense 13-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union over Soviet Ballistic Missiles deployed in Cuba, right on the American doorstep. I grew up under the threat of nuclear war.

As if this isn't enough, just fifty years ago, a couple in their mid-thirties on a single blue-collar wage could buy a house, own a car, and raise a family. Somehow, the program is still running and kids are expected to go to school, study, get a job, get married, and enjoy family life. Today's thirty-somethings are looking at a financial situation that prevents this.

Maybe the prophecies and doom-mongers are right this time .. maybe they are not, but one way or another we are in a situation where; by looking for the comfort of good governance that we are wired for, inclined to believe what we are told by our authority figures, we increasingly wind up with a recipe for anxiety, depression, and the feeling that there is no point.

The Age of Disintegration

When was the last time you felt deeply assured that the world was moving in the right direction? That the institutions that govern our lives were operating with your best interests at heart? That the news was giving you the unvarnished truth?

We live in what might be called an age of disintegration. The bonds that once held families, communities, and nations together seem to be fraying. The shared stories that gave our lives meaning and direction have splintered into competing narratives, each claiming exclusive access to truth.

And this disintegration isn't just social or institutional. It's personal. Depression, anxiety, and loneliness have reached epidemic proportions. Our attention spans have collapsed under the assault of algorithmic media.

The Inversion of Reality

Here comes the first major insight, the feeling that something is fundamentally inverted:

The strange thing is that by most objective measures, we should be living in a golden age. We have conquered diseases that decimated previous generations. We have created technologies that would have seemed like magic to our great-grandparents, and we are accumulating knowledge on a scale unprecedented in human history.

Yet something is clearly amiss. The official narrative .. that we are steadily advancing toward a more enlightened, more prosperous, more just world .. seems increasingly at odds with our lived experience.

It's as if we're being gaslighted on a civilisational scale.

The Illusion of Competence

Part of what makes our current situation so disorienting is the persistent illusion that someone, somewhere, is in control. That there are adults in the room, that the systems governing our lives are being competently managed by people who understand what they're doing.

But look at the track record:

These experts are almost always wrong. Not just occasionally, not just in minor details, but consistently, fundamentally wrong about the most important developments of our time. They didn't foresee the financial crisis of 2008. They didn't predict the rise of populist movements across the Western world. They didn't anticipate the COVID pandemic or its profound social and economic consequences.

Yet they never seem to lose their status as experts. They move seamlessly from one catastrophic error to the next, their authority somehow undiminished by their track record. It's as if the system needs them, to maintain the illusion that someone understands what's happening, that someone is in control.

The Crisis of Meaning

The chapter identifies the deepest layer of the problem:

Perhaps the most profound dimension of our current predicament is what might be called a crisis of meaning. The old stories that gave life coherence and purpose .. religious narratives, national myths, ideological visions .. have lost their power to compel belief.

In their place, we're offered shallow substitutes: consumerism, careerism, partisan tribalism, digital distraction. We're directed to find meaning in what we buy, in our personal 'brand,' in our fleeting moments of online outrage or affirmation.

But these substitutes cannot satisfy the deeper human longing for meaning.

The Hidden Operating System

Here's where the chapter pivots toward the solution. The problem isn't the world, it's our interface with it:

The answer may lie in something we rarely consider: the hidden operating system that governs human thought and behaviour. Not our conscious beliefs or intentions, but the deep architecture of cognition itself .. the hardwired unconscious patterns of perception, prediction, and response that evolved over millions of years to solve ancient problems of survival and reproduction.

This operating system runs beneath our awareness, shaping our thoughts and actions in ways we don't recognise. It's the true source of our politics, our economics, our social arrangements .. and it may be the key to understanding why the world feels broken.

The Great Misunderstanding

The chapter builds to its central revelation:

We tend to think of our minds as rational, agents .. as 'us,' the conscious, deliberate self, making choices and directing our lives. We believe that our perceptions directly reflect reality, that our memories accurately record experience, that our judgments derive from careful analysis of the facts.

But decades of research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology tell a different story.

Our minds are not the clear windows onto reality we imagine them to be. They're more like elaborate simulation machines, constructing models of the world based on limited and biased information, guided by priorities and preoccupations we're largely unaware of.

In other words, we profoundly misunderstand our own minds. And this misunderstanding lies at the root of our current predicament.

Seeing Through the Illusion

The chapter closes with the beginning of hope:

So where does this leave us? If the world isn't broken but functioning according to its design, and if that design reflects a profound misunderstanding of our own minds, what can we do?

The answer might be simpler .. and more radical .. than we imagine. What if we don't need to fix anything? What if we just need to see clearly?

Consider what happens when you realise you've been looking at an optical illusion. The moment you see through the illusion, it loses its power over you. You can't un-see the reality, even if you wanted to.

The Way Forward

The world feels broken because we're trying to navigate it with a cognitive operating system that evolved for a very different environment. Our perceptual and decision-making machinery was shaped by the demands of survival in small bands of hunter-gatherers slowly migrating across the world, not by the complex, interconnected, technology-mediated world we now inhabit.

This mismatch between our cognitive architecture and our current environment creates the sense that something is wrong, that the world is out of joint. And in a way, it is .. but not because it's broken. It's because we're trying to run 21st-century software on Stone-Age hardware.

Summary

Chapter 1 aims to validate the reader's intuitive sense that something is deeply wrong while reframing the problem in a way that points toward solution. The chaos isn't random, it's systematic, predictable, and solvable once you understand what you're actually dealing with.

The discomfort you feel isn't personal pathology; it's accurate perception of a system operating according to rules that no longer match reality. But rather than being victims of this mismatch, we can become conscious participants in updating our own operating system.

The stage is set for Chapter 2's exploration of exactly how this ancient hardware operates, and why understanding it is the key to everything that follows. The reader is now prepared to discover why we keep making the same mistakes, generation after generation, despite our best intentions.

The foundation is laid: we're not broken, we're mismatched. And once you see the mismatch clearly, you can begin to address it consciously rather than being unconsciously driven by it.