There’s a strange consistency in how people talk about the past. No matter the generation, no matter the decade, almost everyone eventually arrives at the same conclusion: life used to be simpler.
People in their sixties say it about the eighties. People in their forties say it about the nineties. People my age say it about the early 2000s. The claim spans cultures and time periods so reliably that it begins to feel less like a historical observation and more like a psychological pattern.
So the uncomfortable question emerges. Was life actually simpler? Or were we?
When we are young, the world we inhabit is narrow but sufficient. Our brains are still developing, which means our capacity for abstraction is limited. We are not yet modeling complex systems or anticipating distant consequences. We are not analyzing incentives or projecting ourselves decades into the future. We are not lying awake at night wondering what our existence means in a universe that is billions of years old.
We think about our family. Some friends. The next game. The next trip. The next small thing that defines our week.
The world feels manageable because our perception of it is contained.
As we grow older, something changes. Our cognitive range expands. We begin to hold multiple perspectives at once. We understand tradeoffs. We see patterns beneath behavior. We notice how status operates quietly in the background of social life, how incentives shape outcomes, how institutions influence individuals. The mind grows more capable, and at the same time more crowded.
And with that expansion comes existential distance.
At some point the questions stop being local and start being cosmic. Why do we exist at all? What is any of this for? Does meaning arise naturally, or do we construct it? Does anything endure? Existentialism is not a cultural accident. It is what happens when a brain becomes capable of abstracting far enough beyond the immediate moment.
The ability to ask those questions is a form of growth. But it also adds weight. The mind that can zoom out to the scale of the universe rarely returns unchanged.
It would be comforting to conclude that the world has always been this complex and that what we are experiencing is simply maturation. In many ways, that is probably true. History was never simple. The nineteenth century was not simple. The mid twentieth century was not simple. People navigated wars, economic collapses, moral upheavals long before smartphones existed. Human nature has always been layered.
But something else feels different now, and it is difficult to ignore.
The amount of information entering our minds has expanded dramatically in a very short period of time. A person today encounters more opinions, more crises, more comparisons in a week than someone a generation ago might have encountered in months. Our awareness is no longer local. It is global and continuous. There is no natural stopping point. The feed does not end.
With that expansion comes a subtle shift in how we experience reality. We do not simply attend events; we document them. We do not just form identities; we curate them. Comparison, once limited to a small circle, is now infinite. Visibility, once occasional, is now ambient. The self becomes something that must be managed in real time.
Consider the contrast between older photographs of public events and modern ones. In earlier images, a crowd simply watches. In contemporary scenes, the crowd holds up phones. The distinction runs deeper than technology. The experience itself becomes layered through mediation, capture, and evaluation.
Layer by layer, directness gives way to commentary.
And layered minds drift toward layered questions.
Who am I compared to everyone else I now see constantly?
What does this mean in the long arc of time?
Am I optimizing correctly?
Am I falling behind?
Somewhere along the way, simplicity dissolves.
And yet our expanded intelligence is one of our greatest strengths. The ability to think systemically and abstractly allows us to build institutions, technologies, and ideas that endure. With sustained effort and complexity of thought, industries shift, cultures evolve, mountains move.
But the same ability, if left unchecked, can overcomplicate the internal experience of living.
There is a reason we admire elite athletes under pressure. In the most consequential moments, with millions watching, their attention narrows. Legacy fades. Narrative fades. Philosophy fades. What remains is the breath, the movement, the next decision.
The compression is intentional. It requires discipline.
It takes humility to resist the urge to layer meaning onto every second. It takes strength to narrow your focus when your mind is capable of expanding infinitely.
As our brains become capable of holding more nuance, more abstraction, more perspective, we rarely ask whether we should hold it all at once. We celebrate expansion. We rarely practice contraction.
Maybe wisdom is not the accumulation of layers, but the deliberate removal of unnecessary ones. The ability to understand the scale of the universe without being paralyzed by it. To know that we are powerful enough to reshape systems and ideas, yet small enough to be one person in a vast and mostly indifferent cosmos.
It takes humility to hold both truths at once.
To recognize that complexity is a gift.
And to recognize that simplicity is often a choice.
Life may not have been simpler.
But our interface with it might have been.
And that interface is something we still have the power to design.