Imagine you’re living in 1825 and you wake up tomorrow in 2025. I think you wouldn’t be able to make sense of almost anything you saw.
If you then went back and described this world to anyone, they’d assume you were telling an impossible fantasy story about gods.
In 1825, roads had no asphalt, there were no cars, no telephone, no vaccines. Shipping was mostly sail based, writing was essentially hand based. Aspirin was 72 years away, refrigerators 26.
In 2025, we live in houses that defy the sun, always bright and always perfectly climate controlled. We eat fresh food from five continents, in any season, without thinking twice. We listen to any music ever recorded at perfect quality while sitting in an armchair, flying in a metal tube across the ocean. We carry in our pocket a tile of glass that lets us talk to anyone we love, anywhere on the planet, and reach all human knowledge instantly.
The Present Is Boring
Yet most people think the present is boring. That’s because they’re standing too close to it.
When you live inside the world, any “world”, everything feels normal, predictable, mundane. It’s the same way children don’t realise they’re growing: change is real, but invisible from the inside.
And this is where there’s trouble. The world is extraordinary, but we barely notice it. Meanwhile, our thinking hasn’t evolved nearly as fast as the environment around us.
The World Upgraded
The world upgraded but we haven’t caught up: we still use mental models built for scarcity, slowness, linear careers, local reality, predictable lives.
But we now live in a world that is shaped by abundance, and speed, and complexity, and choice, and constant communication, and invisible systems doing billions of quiet operations on our behalf.
When your mental model stops matching the environment, it tries to prevail and you approach the world with an outdated lens. None of this is intentional. It’s simply what happens when the terrain changes faster than the map.
This is true for all of us, but I see it even more so in people who were born inside the current version of the world. You didn’t experience the transitions (from slow to fast, from local to global, from limited to infinite choice); you opened your eyes and the world was already fully upgraded.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It “just” means your baseline is radically different from the baseline that shaped most of human history. Your expectations are formed by constant connection, immediate access, infinite options.
Everyone Feels Insufficient
That makes the struggles different. For essentially ever, the challenges humans faced were things like hunger, violence, illness, physical hardships, cold weather, droughts, and uncertainty of tomorrow. Today, they’re more about identity, meaning, choice, recognition.
It’s obviously good that the likelihood of your siblings dying in their first five years of life is not one in three anymore, or that you don’t have to generally worry about starving to death because the summer was colder than usual.
But having too many options, too much information, and too much comparison can make you feel like you should always do more. That’s also not great.
The Dent In The Universe Trap
Years ago I grabbed coffee with someone I used to manage. Cambridge Computer Science degree, working on AI at one of Amazon’s research centres, high-performing, well respected. They wanted to change teams.
“Why?” I asked.
They had no issue with team mates or manager, the work was interesting, the feedback was good.
“I just don’t feel like I’m making a dent in the Universe,” they said.
They were 24.
Their answer wasn’t naïve. It was a reflection of their self-image, built by only ever living in a world where achievement is always visible somewhere else. If your comparison set is global, exceptional can feel like not enough.
That feeling isn’t limited to the young either. I’ve seen it in senior leaders, in smart engineers, in founders, in scientists, in people who have on paper exactly the lives others dream of. They still feel behind, not because they are failing, but because their expectations were shaped by some external expectation.
What To Do About It
I see how this sounds all bleak and pessimistic. But that’s not my actual view: I don’t think we’re just doomed and humanity can’t survive. In fact, I think you can update your understanding of the world instead of blaming yourself for not fitting the old one, and make things better.
You can’t slow the world down. But you can update the narrative you use to interpret it. When the map matches the territory more closely, the feeling of insufficiency softens. Not because you’ve lowered your standards, but because you’ve stopped fighting battles that no longer exist.
Understanding this helps you navigate life more clearly. Instead of chasing someone else’s highlight reel, you can start asking what actually improves your experience. What reduces friction? What clarifies direction? What lowers the mental tax of being alive in this noisy, over-complicated world?
Often the answer is smaller and quieter than you assume: you don’t need to reinvent or reset. You “just” need to realign yourself to reality.
That “just” is not easy, but at least is doable.