If you’ve ever scrolled through Instagram at midnight and felt like everyone else has a better job or a better life than you, you’re probably not alone in this. A new study, titled ‘Evolutionary Mismatch, Stress, and Competition: Making Sense of Psychosocial Problems in the Polycrisis Era,’ published in the journal Behavioral Sciences, by researchers Jose Yong, Amy Lim, Edison Tan, and Sarah Chan, suggests that the urge to measure yourself against others may have less to do with personal insecurity and more with how the human brain was built.
The paper argues that this is not simply insecurity or lack of self-control, but a predictable stress response when modern life makes comparison an almost constant social test. The authors frame that as an evolutionary mismatch: instincts honed for small, familiar groups now struggle with dense cities, digital platforms, and a constant stream of curated status signals.
Your brain wasn't built for this many people
For most of human history, humans lived in small groups of a few dozen to a few hundred people, where everyone knew everyone. Status, danger, and belonging were worked out through familiar faces, not strangers on a screen. The study says that human minds are evolved for that kind of world, a world with a small, stable set of points of comparison.
The paper also points out that the mismatch is not just in how many people but in what kind of social information they provide. In small groups, danger, belonging, and status were read through familiar faces and daily interaction; online, the same comparison instinct can be triggered by strangers, algorithmic feeds, and endless visible achievement.
Today, the average American adult is exposed to thousands of strangers' curated lives every day, through Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and group chats. That gap, the researchers say, is called "evolutionary mismatch," what happens when instincts built for one kind of environment get repeatedly triggered in a different one. Your brain is still running on legacy software, and it was never designed to handle this much input.
