Every once in a while, I like to zoom out and look at how life has changed, not over centuries, but just since our parents’ generation. And when you do that, something interesting starts to show up around the edges. We’re faster now, better connected, more efficient than any humans before us. But in the middle of all that optimisation, a few of our natural abilities seem to be slipping slightly out of focus.
Not in a dramatic, “civilisation is collapsing” way. More like the slow fade of a photograph left in the sun, subtle, quiet, easy to miss unless you’re really paying attention.
Our senses are shifting in the background
Take our vision. Myopia is exploding worldwide, especially in kids. The numbers are wild, researchers at the Brien Holden Vision Institute say that by 2050, half the world could be nearsighted.¹ And honestly, it makes sense. Our eyes weren’t designed for glowing rectangles 25 centimetres away for most of the day. They were built for horizons, sunlight and distance.
Even colour is changing, not the colours themselves, but the way we see them. LEDs, city light pollution, indoor living… they skew the spectrum we’re exposed to. Over time, that subtly shifts how our brains interpret colour.² It’s not dramatic. You’d never wake up and say, “Huh, the sky looks different today.” It’s generational, the kind of change you only notice when comparing two eras side by side.
Hearing? Same story. Headphones, loud cities, constant audio stimulation. The WHO says over a billion young people are already at risk of early high-frequency hearing loss.³ That’s not something that used to happen so early in life.
Even smell, a sense we rarely think about, is fading under pollution, processed food and post-viral effects like COVID.? Smell used to be a navigation tool. Now, most of us barely notice it unless it’s unusually good or bad.
And our minds are being rewired, too
Here’s where it gets interesting. It’s not that humans are getting less intelligent, far from it. But our mental “defaults” are shifting.
Attention has become slippery. Gloria Mark’s research shows our average focus on a single task dropped from 150 seconds in the early 2000s to under 60 seconds today.? Less than a minute. And it’s not because we can’t focus, it’s because the world around us constantly nudges our brain to hop, skip and jump to the next thing.
Memory? We’ve outsourced half of it. Psychologists call it digital amnesia?, we don’t remember phone numbers, directions, birthdays, small facts… because there’s always a device to hold them for us. Our brain adapts accordingly.
Spatial reasoning is fading at the edges too. GPS is amazing, but it means our hippocampus rarely has to build mental maps anymore. Studies from UCL actually show reduced neural activity in habitual GPS users.? We’re still getting places, we’re just not mapping them internally the way we used to.
And imagination… this one hits me the most. Kids today draw fewer scenes from memory than kids did 20 years ago. When every second is filled with video, pictures, animation, there’s less quiet space for the mind to make its own images.
Even our bodies are negotiating with modern life
Our bodies, honestly, are just trying to keep up with how we live.
We sit more. We move less. Each generation is becoming less physically active than the one before, global studies show this clearly.? Strength, posture, mobility… they’re casualties of comfort.
Bone density is subtly dropping because we spend more time indoors, away from sunlight and weight-bearing movement.
And the gut microbiome, this wild, bustling ecosystem inside us has lost diversity over the years. Processed food, less soil exposure, more antibiotics, hyper-clean living… it all shapes the bacteria that shape us.?
Fertility is quietly declining worldwide too, influenced by stress, lifestyle, pollution and environmental chemicals.¹? It’s one of those trends that tells a story bigger than any single individual.
And then there’s the social side of it all
This part feels especially modern.
We talk constantly but speak less. We connect non-stop but struggle with real presence.
Conflict resolution is getting weaker because digital communication lets us avoid discomfort. Messages replace conversations. Silence replaces difficult moments. We drift instead of confronting.
Empathy gets harder when people online feel like avatars rather than humans. Studies on online behaviour show that anonymity lowers empathy and increases polarisation.¹¹ And honestly, you don’t need a scientific study, you can just open a comment section.
And boredom… the thing that once sparked creativity… is vanishing. The second a quiet moment appears, we fill it with scrolling. Stillness becomes something to avoid, not something to sink into.
So what do we do with all this?
Here’s the twist: this isn’t a story of decline. It’s a story of adaptation.
Humans aren’t getting worse. We’re getting optimised for a world we built, a world engineered for speed, convenience and stimulation. And of course, our minds and bodies respond to that environment.
The good news? Most of these abilities can come back if we give them a chance. Attention can be trained. Strength can return. Memory can be rebuilt. Even senses like smell and colour sensitivity can sharpen with exposure.
What’s harder is changing the environment itself, the platforms designed for addiction, the noise of cities, the chemicals around us, the shrinking natural spaces.
So we’re living in this interesting tension: part of us drifting from the humans we once were, part of us still capable of reclaiming those older abilities if we choose to.
Maybe the point isn’t to become “old world” humans again. Maybe it’s just to carry a few ancient skills with us into the modern world, attention, imagination, patience, depth, and the ability to sit with silence for a moment.
Tiny rebellions in a noisy era. But they keep us human.
References
- Holden, B. et al. (2016). “Global Prevalence of Myopia and High Myopia.” Ophthalmology.
- Dikel, E. et al. (2016). “The influence of LED lighting on human colour perception.” Lighting Research & Technology.
- World Health Organization (2021). “Hearing loss due to recreational exposure to loud sounds.”
- Yan, C. et al. (2021). “Environmental pollution and olfactory dysfunction.” Environmental Research.
- Mark, G. (2015). “The Cost of Interrupted Work.” University of California, Irvine.
- Kaspersky Lab Study (2015). “Digital Amnesia: Why We Forget.”
- Javadi, A. H. et al. (2017). “Hippocampal and prefrontal activity during GPS navigation.” Nature Communications.
- Guthold, R. et al. (2018). “Global trends in insufficient physical activity.” The Lancet.
- Blaser, M. (2016). “The microbiome and modern health.” Nature Reviews.
- Levine, H. et al. (2017). “Temporal trends in sperm count.” Human Reproduction Update.
- Suler, J. (2004). “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” CyberPsychology & Behavior.
Credits: Article edited with the help of ChatGPT.