Sometimes it can feel like the universe is against you when the truth is that the universe can be pretty much indifferent. This applies to nature itself, which will function as it has for millions of years without us, and humanity, which hasn't evolved in preparation for high-speed, high-pressure lifestyles and coexisting with many other people, be it millions or even just thousands.
Before we were domesticated by the Agricultural Revolution, we had to function as nomads, hunting, and harvesting until whichever spot we inhabited ran out of resources, and so we'd wander around an area in a cycle. This meant that there couldn't be too many people in the same place at the same time unless you wanted to risk running out of resources too quickly.
So, imagine one person. Say it's a man, thirty years old, tanned skin, dark hair, average build. You don't need to wonder much about what he does, as he's just a hypothetical man, but what if I asked you to imagine one hundred different people at the same time? Though each person in that crowd would be just as human as the first one, they become a mass. Indistinguishable from one another. Nay, indifferent. Would you care if one of them left? How many would there have to be for you to stop caring?
Fret not, that number has been determined.
Monkeys, curiously, can manage to survive in groups of about 50. They have small brains, so they can't really handle any tribe bigger than that, otherwise, you'll see power conflicts and tribes splitting. A British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar took their brains and compared them to those of humans, which are bigger, of course, and our greater capacity for memory meant that we could survive in tribes around 150 people, and this was the size of roaming groups way back in the day.
Would you go out of your way to make some stranger's life easier? Say you're eating at a restaurant. You pick some stuff off the table and onto your plate so the waiter doesn't have to linger more than he has to, but you're dealing with a single waiter.
Now imagine you're at a wedding or any other gala. You generally won't care, you'll leave your glasses and food on the table, sometimes you won't even mind the spills, and why? The staff that's attending you is an amalgamation of penguins and you won't find much of a difference between one or the other, so why would you care if they have to make a bit more of an effort?
Maybe you're more empathetic than the rest, and instead of seeing the security guard as that thing that stands there in the front of the building, or the cashier as that thing which takes your money and gives you an item, you do take the time to treat them well. That doesn't mean you don't have a limit. Usually, you'll be more preoccupied about your family, friends, and some group of people, be it coworkers, classmates, students, and anybody outside of that clique you've formed becomes an outsider to you, sort of like a two-dimensional character.
It sounds like a small issue, but the ways it affects society cut deep. One death is a tragedy, one million deaths are a statistic, which means that you might feel just a little bit down with a mass shooting in the United States, you'll be almost indifferent to a chemical attack in Damascus unless you're very interested in geopolitics, but the death of a family member will hit you hard, and this goes for everyone, not just you. Imagine if you truly cared about everyone. You'd go insane.
The Monkeysphere affects your actions as well. You're not going to screw your neighbors over because you know that you'll have to deal with them eventually, but you'll gladly ignore that the waiter forgot to charge you that second soda because why should that be an issue? This is also why religion can function so well, whichever god you worship is personal.
Think about something you really hate. Corporate. The government. Nazis. We tend to make them entities in our minds, some sort of faceless monster when really they're just organizations made of people. A hunter and a farmer are good because they bring food to a community. Monsanto and Chinese fishing companies are evil because they take it to the extreme, and though they perform the same function on a national or global scale, we can't help but see them as things.
Stories are also affected by this. Let's take Star Wars as an example, specifically, the Empire. Stormtroopers are the faceless henchmen, a dime a dozen, bad aim, and they all look exactly the same, so when one dies, who cares? Then are the officers, who also look samey, except for Tarkin, who takes his place as the more badass of them all, and why? because he destroyed a planet just to prove a point and he can tell Darth Vader what to do.
So, who cares about Darth Vader? Everyone. Since the first moment he stepped into the screen, he was kicking ass and taking names; anybody who ran into him died. Every time we learned something new about him, he came closer to our Monkeysphere. He ceased to be a mask and became a person. He became human. And the more human we saw him as, the more compelling a character he was.
So, who cares about Darth Vader? Everyone. Since the first moment he stepped into the screen, he was kicking ass and taking names; anybody who ran into him died. Every time we learned something new about him, he came closer to our Monkeysphere. He ceased to be a mask and became a person. He became human. And the more human we saw him as, the more compelling a character he was.
Does all of this mean that you simply won't have sympathy for most people? Yeah, pretty much. You're a valet parker, you scratch a car, the first course of action will probably be hiding it as best as you can and using any plausible deniability if you're asked, and that's more often than not a big if. You're a mayor, and you can get 200 thousand dollars if you make a certain deal with a businessman who wants to build some infrastructure. The city might be the worse off for it, but not by much, and though 200,000 is a lot for one person, it's nothing if you split it between a million people. Take that sort of sentiment, imagine it happening all the time, everywhere, and you'll more or less understand why society is the way it is.
Ideally, we could find a way to pocket ourselves into groups of 150 people and roam the world again, while retaining most of our commodities. This is impossible, though, and this is why there always seems to be a war or some other sort of conflict going on in the world, and so it shall be until we either evolve some more of just die off.
The sad part is that modernity does seem to affect us adversely. According to the World Health Organization, around 300 million people suffer from depression, somewhere around 200 million more suffer from others, and around 75-85% of them don't receive any sort of assistance for their conditions. It's harder to find meaning when you're one in a sort of strange mass as society is.
Social media has caught wind of this, more or less. You'll notice that you're always going to be talking to the same people, and though you can see who else is online, you won't really check it out unless you have way too much time on your hands. Some even say that having more than 150 friends on Facebook is superfluous, but we can't resist the dopamine rush of getting likes.
Remember, the issue is not about the physical space that we occupy, but the cranial space, which means that, no matter how many people you can remember if you put your mind to the task, you'll only be able to maintain a certain number of relationships, and amongst those relationships, some will be much more important to you than the rest.
So when you go out there to the world, I won't ask you to just try and see every single person outside of your Monkeysphere as more than a mere thing, because after a certain point it either becomes impossible or you go insane. Rather, whenever you get screwed over, I want you to realize that it's a result of the same mentality that you have and, should the places be flipped, you'd probably do the same. Try and be a better person, definitely. Now that you understand a little more of how the world works, you can go ahead and thrive in the indifference of it all.
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