Inverse to the universe, our world is contracting. This is a little understood factor in the emergence of the new manias and neuroses in our current age.
Thousands of years ago, if some tribes warred, nobody outside of the local region knew about it. If primitives in Asia slaughtered each other, Aboriginals in Australia knew nothing about it.
On the human timeline, most of the human beings who have ever lived knew nothing about the doings of other humans more than a hundred miles from them.
To a tribesman in the Middle East, Australia was as unknown as the dark side of the moon. The world was huge. The earth was flat. Nobody even tried to map this colossal rock until 2500 years ago.
In a mammoth world, the small human being knew his locality. Generations lived and died relatively monotonously, living by quickly learned customs and acquiring food, clothing and housing by simple agricultural and hunting techniques and rudimentary construction. Children weren't separated from parents eight or more hours a day, grandparents weren't left alone to die in mud huts hours from their home locality, herb and mushroom addicts didn't lay like naked zombies in front of decent spirit worshipers' teepees. Adolescent girls didn't vomit up their dates and honey because they didn't look like the girl drawn on the cave wall.
But over the centuries the world got smaller and smaller. White traders introduced opium to yellow people. That sort of thing.
In our current age, everybody knows everything about everybody everywhere. The entire non-flat world has been shrunk to the size of the smartphone screen. Unprecedented knowledge compacted, centuries of wisdom and madness condensed and transformed into electrical charges, magnetic states, optical charges.
What is the problem with our current selves? As the universe expands and our world contracts and our knowledge increases, our psychospace has remained the same size. The hardware of our brains is the same as was packed into cave dwellers, but the software has increased beyond the hardware's capacity.
Our ancestors had simple operating systems that didn't overheat their brain hardware. Our brains are overheated, resulting in thermal throttling, system crashes, component damage—what we call manias, neuroses, addictions.
Ultimately this all leads to shortened lifespans. As was foretold by the Creator:
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. . .
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