I recently saw a meme, or an image involving words and a picture, where it showed a bunch of hairy cavemen sitting placidly around a fire. The overlaying text said something to the effect of, “Sorry I didn’t get back to your message. I was trying to keep up with society with a brain that wants to find berries to survive.”
Although comedic, there is a serious biological and social science behind the message here. In 2025, I beg the question; are our brains being overstimulated with the variety of ways that we can be contacted?
Take my business, Owen’s Hiking And Adventures, for example. Or, any business for that matter.
At any given moment of any given day, I could potentially be reached with an inquiry by my business email, my personal email, Facebook messenger (for my business or personal page), a comment on either of these pages, Instagram inbox, a comment on Instagram, a text message or a face-to-face convrsation. In total, I could be reached by at least 10 different ways. Also consider that I don’t use X, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, WhatsApp or other popular connection apps. Some people can be reached in up to 15 different methods, and in some cases even more.
Perhaps this is a personal rant or anecdote, but I believe from an scientific, evolutionary standpoint that our species is not designed to have this many inputs at any given time. I personally find it challenging to keep up at times. There is no “Off” button anymore, and I argue that this is unhealthy for individuals and society as a whole.
Consider the following timeline I’ve outlined in this article regarding our species, which has had a developed intelligent brain for 200 million years. To be clear, our species homo sapiens didn’t exist until just 300,000 years ago. However, from the perspective of our ancestors and for the sake of this conversation, we will look back 200 million years to the breakthrough marker of when we developed the cerebrum region of the brain, responsible for language, critical thinking, creativity and information processing.
In 1876, Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell successfully invented the first working telephone. As line-connected telephones became more commonplace in the world’s major western cities in the 1880s, it was seen as a limited necessity versus a luxury. Our modern day social and technological problems hadn’t even begun yet.
As the 1900s arrived, the world saw telephone lines being installed across countries around the globe. The 1930s saw a big jump in household land line phones in homes of developed nations, yet, this novel form of contact was only deemed as essential communication. We were still light-years away from sending cute cat photos and nastily bickering about politics over a tiny screen.
Decades went by before electronic mail (email) started to enter the scene. In 1971, American computer programmer Ray Tomlinson sent the first email.
While 1990 may seem like a long time ago, it is just a blip in time when it comes to human evolution. It’s significantly less than one second on the 24-hour clock of our human species’ existence. As the 1990s progressed, email became normalized for both personal and business communication. From there, it took less than 10 years for email to become borderline mandatory for communication and business success. Social media was looming around the corner, and nobody even knew yet what it was, nor could they have fathomed a concept like it.
While email enjoyed its development spree, cell phones actually followed an almost identical timeline and path in their rise to commonality. They were invented in the early 1970s, were used by high-tier business people in the 1980s and 1990s, and became widely affordable and compact by the time 2000 broke.
Then came social media. When referring to Homo sapiens' time on Earth, social media has existed for a fraction of a fraction of a second on the 24-hour clock of our existence. Soon, social media was no longer for business and important phone calls. Instead, it became a hyper-convenient informal space to keep in touch with others.
By the time the 2010s arrived, social media was also seen as a mandatory boon for businesses, politicians and any human entity you could think of.
What am I getting at? If you do the math of approximately 200 million years divided by 30 years or normalized tech exposure, our species has been inundated with normalized technology communication for 0.00000015% of our intelligent existence.
Do you believe this is good for us and sustainable?