I feel like the human race is closer to its animal primal form now more than ever...

There's an argument out there that human behavior is governed more or less along the lines of constraints. Whatever there is a scarcity of determines how we react and how we structure our lives.

For instance, in pre-society days, the biggest constraint humans had was food. We learned to hunt and gather and live nomadically because that's what our behavior called. Later on we developed trades and markets and money became the biggest constraint. We invented jobs and businesses and commodities and money became the cornerstone of our societies and it became the controlling factor in people's lives. Before that you can look at things like land and the age of exploration and conquests and empires. Human dignity never really mattered. People were just tools to serve in the interest of a greater societal beckoning.

And now you have what is called the 'attention economy' where people's time is now the biggest constraint. There's a flood of content and entertainment and rapid-fire news cycles that are all competing for our time. We have stopped consuming the product and have reached the point where we ARE the product. These platforms depend on our viewership and engagement and are pulling all the stops necessary to keep us addicted.

What that ends up doing is showing us the most superficial and most extremes of human behavior. It is sensationalizing the actions of a small number and amplifying the loudest voices in the room. You look at the way these outlets portray human behavior and become either mystified or enraged because anything less than that isn't very good at retaining our attention, and more often than not it is the latter because our brains are wired to be more attuned to negative outcomes.

And what ends up happening is that we don't even see individuals anymore, but we see people as mouthpieces for various political or social ideologies. We see each other as perverse and destructive and fundamentally irredeemable. And it's sad because the people we see in the real world are almost never as bad as the ones we see online. And its because the attention economy forces drive us to conflict and indignation.

It's sad because most people think that what they see online or on the news is an accurate reflection of what people are like in their daily lives