Steven Bartlett with Dr Bill von Hippel
Despite living in the safest, wealthiest era in history, human happiness is stagnating because modern conveniences have allowed us to trade our essential need for a tribe for endless personal autonomy.
Our evolutionary drive for autonomy originally helped us secure the best personal prospects within a tight-knit tribe, but today it causes us to self-isolate and abandon the social connections we require for psychological well-being.
While urban living and increased wealth provide endless opportunities and comfort, they strip away the mandatory interdependence that naturally bonds poorer and rural communities together into happier groups.
Modern innovations like pornography and social media hijack our biological reward systems by providing high-stimulus, low-effort substitutes that are actively decreasing actual sexual intimacy and real-world socializing.