Midline Monday: understanding our factory settings
Our body and brain aren't broken, they're running very old software
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Weekly Reflections
The more I learn about myself the more I realize my body and brain are behaving exactly as designed.
The problem is that we’re all running very, very old software.
Here’s the rough math; modern humans have walked the earth for roughly 60,000 years. Recorded history (writing, cities, civilization) is about 5,000 years old.
The internet, mobile phones, social media, and now AI have all arrived within the last 30 years.
That means the technologies reshaping how we eat, work, connect, and see ourselves represent approximately 0.0005% of human history.
So we have 60,000 years of evolution contending with 30 year old technology. Our biology simply hasn’t caught up.
The pace of change > the pace of our ability to adopt.
The Default Settings
Biologists call this the evolutionary mismatch problem. Our software was built for a world that no longer exists and the default settings are working against us.
Here are four places where this shows up most clearly.
Food
For most of human history, calories were scarce and hard to earn. The body that stored fat aggressively, craved sugar and salt, and never felt quite full enough survived.
In 2025, that same body can order delivery from anywhere at anytime and encounters engineered hyper-palatable food.
We’re not weak-willed, we’re just trying to avoid starvation in a surplus world.
Stress
Our stress response is a masterpiece of engineering. A threat appears. Within seconds, cortisol and adrenaline flood our systems. Heart rate spikes. Muscles prime. We sprint, fight, or hide.
The threat resolves and the body resets.
The problem is our nervous system cannot tell the difference between a lion and text message.
Modern threats; debt, deadlines, performance reviews, difficult conversations are chronic, abstract, and unresolvable by physical action.
So, the alarm fires. Nothing gets resolved and the cortisol just keeps running.
The body was designed for short bursts of danger followed by rest. Instead, we exist in a constant low-grade emergency that never ends.
Status
For most of human history, our tribe was our survival. Being accepted meant food, protection, and belonging. Being cast out meant death. The brain evolved to treat social rejection as a life-threatening emergency.
That system is still running. Today it processes likes, follower counts and career titles through the same circuitry.
The comparison loop. The status anxiety. The chronic sense of not being quite enough. That's not vanity. That's a survival mechanism applied to an environment it was never built for.
The Threat Brain
Our brain was not designed to make us happy. It was designed to keep us alive. Those are very different jobs.
Threats were given far more mental weight than rewards, because the cost of missing a predator was death, while the cost of a false alarm was just wasted energy. Better scared and alive than calm and eaten.
That asymmetry still governs us. It’s why one critical comment drowns out ten compliments. Why we catastrophize, doomscroll, and rehearse the worst-case scenario at 2am.
Research tells us that loss hurts twice as much as an equivalent gain feels good.
The Point of All This
Understanding our default settings doesn’t excuse them. But it can change our relationship with them.
Often we try and change our behaviour without ever understanding the machinery underneath. We white-knuckle our way through diets and anxiety, suppress comparison, and bully ourselves into motivation.
Through understanding our biology, we can be better equipped to meet the moment. Perhaps we can view our challenges not as personal failures, but as an ancient system doing exactly what it was built to do, in an environment it was never built for.
The gap between the instinct and the action is where real change lives. It’s small. But it’s ours and we can begin to exert agency in the moment.
That’s the work.
Onward 🖤