Maybe we were never supposed to think this hard.
We’ve long celebrated human consciousness as our crowning evolutionary achievement. Self-awareness, reflection, the ability to question our existence—these traits separate us from the animals and, for better or worse, define us.
But at some point, maybe consciousness stopped being an evolutionary advantage and became a burden.
Ask yourself this: Does all this thinking make us any happier? Is our constant search for meaning improving our lives, or is it dragging us into existential quicksand?
Take animals. Jadie and Charlie don’t worry about death or whether they’re making the most of their time on Earth. They live fully in the moment, happy with a belly rub or a good nap. They’ve got it figured out.
Meanwhile, we seem to have let our evolved consciousness morph into something that keeps us in a state of near-perpetual anxiety.
You could argue that consciousness helped us develop civilizations, create art, and advance technology. But look at what that consciousness has also done: we’ve built structures that outpace our ability to manage them—be it global markets, social media, or artificial intelligence. We’ve created problems like climate change and nuclear weapons, both products of minds too smart for their own good.
And with all our thought power, we still can’t figure out how to live in peace, or how to avoid constantly revisiting the same social and political dysfunctions. Every step forward seems to spawn two steps back, because our thinking breeds complexity we’re ill-equipped to handle.
More than that, our consciousness often pulls us out of the present. We dwell on past mistakes, fret about the future, and forget to appreciate the here and now. While a dog’s life might seem simpler, maybe they’re not the ones missing out.
It’s not just that we can think—it’s that we’re constantly forced to think. Our evolved brains don’t seem to have an off switch. We wake up already playing catch-up to our to-do lists, bombarded by thoughts, worries, and information overload. Consciousness, once our ally, now seems more like a relentless critic, never satisfied and always demanding more.
Perhaps we’ve over-evolved. Consciousness, like technology, may have gone past the point of usefulness and into the realm of chaos, creating dilemmas we might not be equipped to resolve. As we grapple with an overabundance of awareness, it’s worth asking: was it ever supposed to get this complicated?
That’s consciousness for you—sometimes it’s too much of a good thing. And maybe we’ve thought ourselves into a corner.
