Humans were designed to live in bands of 30–45 members. Now we live in a world where you can come into contact with hundreds or even thousands of people every day, and orders of magnitude more if you count virtual interactions. Our brains simply aren't designed to manage a network of relationships that complex, as Robin Dunbar has shown.
While pondering this recently, I made the connection with how we mass-produce chicken meat. There are huge buildings filled with up to 20–30,000 chickens. Of course this is much larger than the number of birds that would naturally live in close proximity, and it screws up their pecking order. To keep the chickens from self-harm (pulling out their own feathers) or injuring others, they cut off most of their beaks when they are chicks.
Cram too many humans into close proximity without the proper tools to healthily navigate and manage such a large network and you wind up with similar problems—mental health, self harm, and harming others.
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