I used to think of thinking as something elevated. As clarity. As a movement toward truth. But it seems that it the rate of return is not linearly increasing anymore. The exercise of thinking has usually done extraordinary things for us as a species. It gave us tools before we had hands steady enough to make them. It gave us language, mathematics, cities. But it also gave us the ability to suffer in advance.
Our brains evolved to predict it just well enough, it was never about uncovering more and more truth. Early on, imagination was protection. If you could picture a lion behind the bush—even when there wasn't one—you survived longer. A false alarm was safer than a missed threat. But the same mechanism that once saved us also learned how to scare us. The mind got very good at inventing dangers, because we don't live in those worlds anymore, and can surely afford fewer predictions of danger. Our brains just like our bodies do not know what to do anymore with the version of life we live now. With every new step up in human development, we get further and further away from the world we were built to live in, and therefore our biological make up becomes more and more incompatible with our needs. At some point, we needed to be physically strong enough to hunt animals for survivial. But we don't now. But our bodies don't respond well to lack of movement. So we invented gyms. Similarly,in the future we wouldn't even need our brains as much. And then engaging in mentally demanding activities would not be for survival, but because our biological make up needs that exercise. So a lot of things just to make sure your incompatible self is able to survive in the world we would have created. It is already happening- so most of what we think is just our brains using heavy duy tools on really negligible inputs. Anxiety is now a mental illness, which we know would have been a weapon of survival in the environemnts we were built to live in.