Why Life Feels So Wrong

In 1925, baboons on a concrete island in the London Zoo tore each other apart — not because they were broken, but because they had been placed in conditions their nervous systems were never built to handle.

Anthony Stevens asks what happens when you do the same thing to a human being. His answer: most of what you call anxiety, depression, alienation, and the persistent feeling that something about your life is fundamentally off may not be a personal failure. It may be a mismatch — between an ancient organism and a modern enclosure it never agreed to live inside.
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