Your Brain Was Made By a World That No Longer Exists

There is a quality about life that most of us feel but can't quite name. There's this persistent sense that today doesn't fit right, like wearing shoes that are too small. You wake up anxious about things your grandparents never imagined worrying about. You scroll through your phone feeling vaguely guilty, vaguely overwhelmed, vaguely confused about what you're supposed to be doing with your life. The world moves faster than you can keep up, yet somehow slower than you need it to. Nothing makes sense the way it should.

Your brain was shaped by a world that stayed mostly the same. For most of human history, from about 300,000 years ago until very recently, the world your great-great-great-grandparents inhabited looked remarkably similar to the world their great-great-great-grandparents knew. Sure, there were innovations. Tools, agriculture, construction, writing. But most of these changes unfolded over thousands of years. You could live your entire life without experiencing any fundamental shift in how reality worked.

Though it was slowly becoming more sophisticated, our brain evolved in an environment of comparative stability. It got really good at pattern recognition, at applying previous solutions to new problems, at trusting that tomorrow would look basically like yesterday. This is the pre-wired brain or "hard-brain" as I call it in my books. I like pre-wired better now, I think it is more accurate. It's hardwired for a static world where the same strategies work generation after generation.

Then something changed. In fact, a lot of things changed.

Technology started accelerating. Not gradually, but exponentially. The pace of transformation that used to take centuries now happens in decades. The shifts that used to take decades now happen in years. We've gone from letter-writing to email to texting to social media in less than a single lifetime. From maps to GPS to augmented reality. From libraries to Google to AI that can read mammograms better than any human. The world that shaped your brain no longer exists, yet your brain still operates according to its original programming.

This creates what has been called the Exponential Gap (Azhar, 2021). The distance between how fast the world changes and how fast your brain can adapt keeps growing wider. You're running ancient software on today's hardware, trying to process a reality your evolutionary programming never faced nor anticipated. Every day, you face questions that would have seemed ridiculous to previous generations. Is gender fluid? Is climate change real? Should corporations know everything about my online behavior? Can AI replace my job? These aren't just new questions. They're the kinds of questions that wouldn't even make sense until technology made them possible in just the last 20 years.

The real problem isn't just that technology outpaces your brain. That would be challenging enough. The deeper issue is that your pre-wired brain actively resists rewiring itself in certain ways (religion, for example) and at certain times in your life (elderly). There's a cognitive bias called the Einstellung effect that basically means your brain often defaults to applying old solutions to new problems, even when those solutions no longer work. It's the tendency to let preexisting knowledge block you from finding better answers. This is ubiquitous.

People trying to apply medieval wisdom to thoroughly recent dilemmas. The Bible doesn't say anything about social media algorithms. The Quran is silent on cryptocurrency. The Vedas never mention genetic engineering. These weren't questions when those texts emerged. Yet due to the Einstellung effect, society keeps trying to force ancient frameworks onto unprecedented situations. Not because these frameworks offer the best answers, but because your brain prefers familiar patterns.

This isn't about intelligence. Some of the smartest people I know operate from profoundly medieval psychological structures. They can debug quantum computers while maintaining fundamentally hierarchical, authority-based meaning systems. A brilliant engineer can build sophisticated AI while being psychologically destabilized by gender fluidity. Technical competence has nothing to do with psychological flexibility.

For this reason it is possible to have a widely adopted technologically advanced civilization filled with bright ideas that is nevertheless driven by basically medieval psychological behavior. Look around you.

The medieval mindset craves certainty because uncertainty was literally deadly for most of human history. This brain style defaults to hierarchy as the natural order of things. Someone must be in charge. There must be clear rules about who has authority and who doesn't. Knowledge flows from the top down, from those who possess truth to those who need teaching. Your identity comes from the group you belong to, not from who you become through conscious effort. The clan, the religion, the nation, the political party provides your sense of self.

Medieval thinking treats knowledge as something received rather than discovered. Truth comes from sacred texts, traditional authorities, inherited wisdom. The idea that you might need to figure things out yourself, that reality might be more complex than the stories you were told, that previous answers might not apply to current circumstances feels dangerous and wrong to medieval minds. Innovation threatens the system. Individual discovery undermines established order.

Now imagine this psychology trying to navigate constant transformation. Every foundational assumption gets challenged. Authority becomes distributed across networks instead of flowing from single sources. Knowledge changes faster than institutions can process it. Individual experience becomes more relevant than received wisdom. Categories that seemed permanent become fluid. The pace of change makes traditional responses obsolete before they can be fully implemented.

The result is psychological chaos. Most people experience this acceleration as an assault on everything that makes life meaningful and comprehensible, though they can't articulate why exactly. They're not wrong to feel threatened. The psychological tools they possess really are inadequate for the reality they're facing. But instead of developing new tools, medieval minds typically double down on the old ones. This is exactly what the Einstellung effect predicts.

This brings us to something most people haven't noticed yet. There's a fundamental shift happening in how we relate to the world itself. For all of human history until very recently, people lived IN the world. The world was a relatively fixed stage where human drama unfolded. You were born into a reality that existed independently of you, learned its rules, played your role, and died. The world remained basically unchanged by your presence.

That's no longer true.

You don't live IN the world anymore. You live INTO it. The world is no longer a static stage but a constantly morphing interface between human consciousness and technological possibility. Every choice you make, every click, every search, every purchase feeds algorithms that reshape the information landscape for everyone else. You're not just navigating reality, you're actively constructing it. The world changes because you're in it, and it changes faster than you can track.

This isn't metaphorical. The digital environment you inhabit adapts to your behavior in real-time. Your social media feed isn't the same as anyone else's. Your search results are personalized. Your recommendations are unique. Reality itself has become customizable, algorithmic, responsive. You're not discovering a fixed truth, you're participating in an ongoing process of reality construction.

Living INTO the world rather than IN it requires a completely different psychological operating system. You can't rely on established patterns when the patterns keep shifting. You can't trust authorities when authority has become distributed and contested. You can't wait for previous generations to tell you what's true when truth itself has become fluid and personalized.

This is where something remarkable starts happening.

There's a generation emerging that doesn't experience any of this as strange or wrong. Generation Alpha, born roughly between 2010 and 2025, represents the first humans who never knew a pre-digital world. They don't remember a time before smartphones, before social media, before AI, before constant connectivity. For them, this isn't the future. It's just reality.

A friend of mine was asked recently by a ten-year-old, "Were you born in the 1900s?" How does this Gen Alpha girl start her day? She wakes up to a personalized AI-generated lesson plan. She checks a group chat where half her friends are avatars from across the globe. While eating breakfast (likely cereal), she's already curated a short-form video for her niche interest group on climate action. None of this feels "online" to her. There's no boundary between digital and physical. It's all just life.

She moves through constant change not as a visitor but as a native. This isn't multitasking or distraction. It's living in a world where transformation is the baseline. She doesn't need authorities to tell her what things mean because she's used to creating meaning through her own experience. She doesn't need rigid categories because she's comfortable with fluid boundaries. She doesn't need simple answers because she's learned to navigate uncertainty.

According to recent surveys, about 22% of Gen Z adults identify as LGBTQ+, with even higher percentages in younger cohorts. Nearly 40% of U.S. Gen Z and 30% of young Christians identify as LGBTQ. This isn't primarily about sexuality. It's a diagnostic indicator of psychological flexibility. Gender fluidity demonstrates comfort with categories that previous generations experienced as fixed and binary, exactly the kind of cognitive flexibility that navigating constant change requires.

This generation shows progressive political leanings that don't shift conservative as they age, unlike historical patterns. They prioritize diversity and inclusion at rates far exceeding older generations. 76% of Gen Zers believe these are important issues for brands to address, compared to 46% of Baby Boomers. They're more engaged with climate change, more open about mental health, more activist oriented about social justice.

But here's what really matters. Over 40% of the world's population is under 25 years old. Though many of them have no access to technology, they desire it badly, and the majority that possess it to some degree cannot conceive of a world without artificiality pervading it. They embody constant transformation in ways previous generations never could. Their brains are being shaped by technological immersion from birth, developing what recent neuroscience research reveals as superior cognitive flexibility (their brains re-wire easily).

A study that put electrodes on 148 people's heads discovered something that changes how we understand intelligence. The smartest people didn't have the most active brains. They had the most adaptable brains. Their theta waves in the midfrontal region operated like flexible orchestras, adjusting coordination moment by moment based on what was needed. When rules changed, their brains changed with them.

This is the distinction between pre-wired and re-wired brains. Pre-wired brains are hardwired for stability, locked into patterns that worked for thousands of years. Re-wired brains maintain neuroplastic flexibility, adapting to novel circumstances in real-time. Generation Alpha is developing this adaptability by necessity. They're the first truly re-wired generation.

This doesn't mean they're automatically wise or free from problems. They're experiencing considerable psychological challenges, significant anxiety, genuine suffering. But their difficulties represent something different than what previous generations faced. They're not struggling because the world doesn't make sense. They're struggling because they're psychologically adapted to a reality that older generations find disorienting and threatening, while being raised by people who can't help them navigate it.

Gen Alpha isn't trying to live in a medieval world that isn't theirs. They're trying to build lives in institutions designed for people with completely different psychological needs. They're future-shifted, attempting to become something other than regular worker bees in the established way of things. Much of their anxiety emerges from this temporal displacement.

Yet they're positioned to transform everything. They don't need to unlearn medieval assumptions because they never learned them in the first place. They don't need to overcome the Einstellung effect because their brains haven't been locked into rigid patterns. They don't need to adjust to living INTO the world because it's the only world they've ever known.

The transformation from pre-wired to re-wired consciousness isn't happening through institutional reform or political movements. It's happening through demographics. With 40% of the world's population under 25, we're watching human consciousness itself evolve in real-time. The question isn't whether this transformation will occur. It's already occurring. The question is whether those of us with pre-wired brains can develop the flexibility to navigate it.

Because here's the thing that keeps me up at night. The world that shaped your brain is gone. It's not coming back. You can spend your energy trying to preserve it, applying medieval solutions to modern problems, doubling down on the Einstellung effect. Or you can recognize that you're living at the most remarkable moment in human history, witnessing the transformation of human consciousness itself.

You have a choice. You can resist the change, insist that things should work the way they used to, demand that reality conform to the categories you were taught. Or you can start rewiring. Not because change is good or bad, but because it's here. Because your kids and grandkids are already living in a world you're still trying to understand. Because the gap between how your brain works and how the world works will only keep growing unless you actively develop new capacities.

The pre-wired brain served humanity well for hundreds of thousands of years. It got us to this point. But we're at a threshold where the old wiring no longer serves us. We need neuroplasticity, psychological flexibility, comfort with uncertainty. We need to learn to live INTO a constantly transforming reality rather than IN a static world.

Generation Alpha will do this naturally. The rest of us have to cultivate it.

The good news is human brains can rewire themselves. That's what neuroplasticity means. We're not permanently stuck in our hardwired patterns. The capacity for adaptation exists in every human brain. It's one of our defining characteristics as a species. But rewiring requires conscious effort, deliberate practice, willingness to let go of comfortable certainties.

You might think this sounds exhausting. It can be. Or you might recognize it as the most exciting time to be alive. We're not just witnessing technological change. We're watching human consciousness itself transform. We're living in the prequel to what I call the Modern, the moment when humanity fully embraces constant becoming rather than static being.

You're in charge of which path you take. The world isn't waiting for you to decide. It's transforming with or without your participation. But if you choose to actively engage with this transformation, to develop the psychological flexibility this moment demands, to rewire your pre-wired brain for the world that actually exists rather than the world that used to be, something remarkable becomes possible.

You stop being a victim of change and become a conscious participant in your own evolution.

That's what the re-wired brain (flex-brain in the book) offers. Not certainty or comfort, but agency, responsibility. Not simple answers, but prescient readiness, prequel thinking, the capacity to navigate complexity. Not a return to stability, but skill in dancing with constant transformation.

Generation Alpha is showing us what's possible. They're not smarter than previous generations. They're more flexible. They're not better people. They're better adapted to the reality we all share. And if they can develop this capacity by accident of birth, we can develop it through conscious cultivation.

The medieval world is ending. The modern world is being born. You're living in between. That's uncomfortable, disorienting, sometimes terrifying. But it's also unprecedented in its possibilities.

Your brain was made by a world that no longer exists. The question is whether you're willing to rebuild it for the world that does. Harmogenics is one way to get there.