People are not that smart.

I don’t mean this in a condescending way. I just mean that as humans, despite our ability to build civilizations, when it comes down to it, we are still very simple-brained creatures.

We are irrational, we act against better judgement all the time. We spend YEARS in self-destructive thought loops and feeling like we need to start doing life better.

Yet. Our brains seem to be preoccupied with overriding all rational thought.

And there is good reason for this. We are programmed to survive in a primitive world where the threat of being eaten by tigers, or speared by a Neanderthal was a real possibility.

Back then, high-level thinking would get you killed. So our brains are hardcoded to be hyper-reactive for the sake of survival over deep and intellectual thought.

But the world has changed a lot since then.

We no longer need to survive in the way that our prehistoric ancestors did. We now need to navigate a world where the survival stakes are much lower, but the complexity of life is extraordinarily high.

And unfortunately, we’ve never received a system update. Our brains are still operating on outdated software.

In the world of biology, this is known as an “evolutionary mismatch."

And evolutionary mismatches lead to a host of problems. Just go to ChatGPT and tell it to run you a list of problems caused by evolutionary mismatches in humans, and you’ll soon realize that it is the single most significant cause of suffering in affluent societies:

These are all products of evolutionary mismatches. If you notice, these problems are almost exclusively unique to humans and rarely occur naturally in the wild.

Since we now live in complex society, the optimal survival strategy has changed.

Being able to defend against tigers and Neanderthals has been replaced by a need to navigate through office politics, dopamine overload, and a generally fast paced society that doesn’t allow time to rest or reset.

This requires the brain to override it’s default programming, and to move into a new paradigm of thinking multi-dimensionally, drawing connections between disparate information, and seamlessly integrating conscious awareness with subconscious intuition.

This is Tier 3 thinking, and very few people will ever reach this level of human thought.

It requires an uncomfortably intense degree of focus and intentionality.

I want to be clear, this is not about being smart, or having high IQ, or whatever other bulls**t metric society tries to measure people with.

Anybody who is capable of conscious thought, can access Tier 3 thinking, but most will not, because they are too distracted.

But YOU on the other hand… you are here, reading a long-form article when you could be doing literally anything else, which means that you’re already several astronomical units ahead of most people.

This fact alone places you in Tier 2 at the least.

And on that note, let’s break down each Tier so you can see where you stand.

80% of people are here.

This is survival mode. The default mode of human existence.