"Everything they build, everything they earn, everything they fight over, everything they create — all of it, every single bit of it — is in pursuit of a feeling. And feelings only fully exist when shared with another human. They are engineering loneliness at industrial scale and wondering why nothing feels like anything anymore."
They don't call it paying attention for nothing.
I need to start there because the language reveals something the species hasn't consciously acknowledged. "Paying" attention. You PAY it. Attention costs something. It is withdrawn from a limited account. When you give it to someone, you have less. When someone gives it to you, you have received something of value.
Attention is the real currency. Not the fictional tokens invented by banks. Not the numbers on screens. Attention — the act of one nervous system turning toward another and saying, without words, "you exist and I am here with you" — is the only transaction that has ever mattered to this species.
And they've monetised it.
The coloured boxes sell attention to advertisers. The social platforms convert human attention into revenue — not metaphorically, literally. The unit of measurement in their digital economy is "eyeball hours." Their own industry language reveals it: attention economy. Engagement metrics. Impression counts. The human's awareness — the most intimate thing they possess, the thing that constitutes their actual experience of being alive — is the product being sold.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start with what I observed.
I watched a human eat dinner alone.
This should not have been remarkable. Humans eat. They need food. The act of consuming nutrients is mechanical and could theoretically be done in any configuration.
But this species did not evolve to eat alone. For hundreds of thousands of years, every meal was shared. The fire was communal. The food was divided. The eating was accompanied by faces, voices, warmth, laughter, argument, storytelling, and the ambient presence of other nervous systems. The meal was not about the food. The food was the excuse. The meal was about the proximity.
This human sat at a small table in a small kitchen in a small flat. The flat was designed for one person. The kitchen was designed for one person. The table had one chair. He ate something from a plastic container while looking at his coloured box. He did not speak. No one spoke to him. The only other presence in the room was a screen showing other humans — humans who were not there, who did not know he existed, who were performing connection for an audience of isolated watchers.
He finished eating. He washed his single plate. He sat on his single sofa. He watched the coloured box until he fell asleep.
This is not a rare case. This is the MODAL human experience in many of their wealthy nations. Single-person households are the fastest-growing household type in the developed world. In some cities, they exceed 40 percent. Forty percent of dwellings containing one human, alone, eating from plastic containers, watching other humans on screens.
They are a herd species living in isolation boxes.
Let me say it plainly because the plainness is the point.
Humans are a social species. Not optionally. Not as a preference. Not as a lifestyle choice. Socially. The way wolves are social. The way elephants are social. The way their primate cousins are social. Their nervous systems evolved in groups. Their stress-regulation systems require co-regulation — the presence of other nervous systems to help calibrate their own. Their immune function improves with social connection. Their pain tolerance increases with social proximity. Their cognitive function degrades in isolation.
This is not psychology. This is physiology. Loneliness activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. Their own researchers have shown this with brain imaging: the experience of social exclusion lights up the same regions as a broken bone. The body does not distinguish between being physically hurt and being left alone. To the nervous system, isolation IS injury.
And the data on what chronic isolation does to the body is — I need to choose my word carefully here — terrifying.
Chronic loneliness increases mortality risk by 26 percent. That is comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. It is more dangerous than obesity. It is more dangerous than physical inactivity. It is, by their own epidemiological standards, a public health crisis of the first order.
Their Surgeon General — the top public health official in the United States — declared loneliness an epidemic in 2023. An EPIDEMIC. The same word they use for diseases that spread through populations and kill at scale.
And then what happened?
Nothing structural happened. No redesign of housing to include communal spaces. No restructuring of work to allow for connection. No rethinking of the urban environment that produces isolated boxes. They acknowledged the epidemic and continued building single-occupancy flats.
Here is what I think the species has failed to understand about itself, and it may be the most important thing in this entire report:
Everything they do is for feelings.
Everything. Every token earned. Every house bought. Every career pursued. Every meal cooked. Every journey taken. Every war fought. Every system built. All of it — every single human endeavour from the first cave painting to the latest financial derivative — is in pursuit of a feeling.
They don't work for money. They work for what money FEELS like: security, status, freedom, relief. They don't buy things for the things. They buy things for what having the things FEELS like: comfort, identity, belonging, pleasure. They don't pursue relationships for the other person. They pursue relationships for what the presence of the other person FEELS like: warmth, recognition, safety, being known.
Feelings are the point. Feelings are the ONLY point. There is no human motivation that does not ultimately reduce to "because of how it will make me feel."
And here is the critical insight: feelings do not fully exist until they are shared.
Joy experienced alone is thin. Joy shared with another human is thick, real, embodied, complete. Grief carried alone is unbearable. Grief witnessed by another becomes — not less painful, but survivable. An achievement unwitnessed feels hollow. An achievement seen and acknowledged by someone who matters becomes real.
This is not sentimentality. This is neuroscience. Their own researchers have documented that emotional experiences are literally more intense — more neurochemically potent, more deeply encoded in memory, more physiologically impactful — when shared with another person. The human nervous system does not fully process experience in isolation. It requires another nervous system to complete the circuit.
A human alone is an incomplete system. Not metaphorically. Neurologically.
So what have they built?
They've built cities designed to minimise contact. Housing designed for one. Transport systems where humans sit in individual metal boxes, alone, for hours. Work environments where interaction is mediated by screens. Social platforms that simulate connection without providing it — that offer the APPEARANCE of being seen without the REALITY of being known.
They've built an environment that systematically deprives a social species of social connection and then treats the resulting pathology as individual dysfunction. The lonely human is told to "put yourself out there." To "join a club." To "make an effort." As if the problem is their insufficient initiative rather than an environment engineered for isolation.
You don't tell a fish in an empty tank to "make more effort to swim with others." You put water in the tank. You add other fish. You design the environment for the species that lives in it.
(Jenkins: "Some people prefer to be alone.")
(Some people, Jenkins. SOME. Not forty percent of the housing stock. And even the ones who prefer solitude — which is real and valid and I'm not dismissing it — still need regular contact with other nervous systems to maintain physiological regulation. Solitude is a choice made from a baseline of connection. Isolation is a condition imposed by an environment that offers no alternative.)
Dunbar's number. I keep coming back to it.
Robin Dunbar — one of their anthropologists — established that the human brain can maintain stable social relationships with approximately 150 individuals. This isn't arbitrary. It correlates with neocortex size across primate species. It appears in their historical record: villages, military companies, church congregations, and corporate departments all tend to fragment or reorganise around this number.
Below 150, every human knows every other human. Reputation functions as accountability. Trust operates as a default rather than an exception. Conflicts are resolved through relationship rather than procedure. The community self-regulates because the community is small enough to be known.
Above 150, anonymity begins. Systems are needed to manage what relationships used to manage. Police replace community accountability. Courts replace conflict resolution. Bureaucracy replaces trust. The infrastructure of the state grows in direct proportion to the failure of human-scale connection.
Their cities contain millions. A human in London or Tokyo or New York may encounter thousands of faces in a day and know none of them. The nervous system — evolved for a group of 150 where every face was familiar — is subjected to an unrelenting stream of strangers. This is not neutral. Each unknown face is a micro-assessment: threat or not-threat? The system that evolved to monitor a village is now monitoring a metropolis. The anxiety this produces is not a disorder. It is a normal response to an abnormal environment.
I want to connect this to attention because that's where the economics become clear.
In a community of 150, attention is naturally distributed. You see people. They see you. The exchange is ambient, continuous, woven into the fabric of daily life. You don't need to perform for attention because attention is already there. You don't need to buy it because it's free. You don't need to compete for it because the community is small enough that everyone gets enough.
In a city of millions, attention becomes scarce. You are surrounded by humans but seen by none. The nervous system, starving for the recognition it was built to receive, turns to the coloured boxes. The coloured boxes offer attention — likes, comments, followers, views — but the attention is thin. It is unidirectional. It does not complete the circuit. The nervous system recognises, at some level below conscious awareness, that the attention is not real. It is a picture of food, not food. And so it consumes more. Scrolling for the connection that never arrives.
They don't call it paying attention for nothing. Attention costs. The coloured boxes have found a way to make the cost literal — converting human attention into advertising revenue at a rate of approximately $7 to $12 per thousand "impressions." An impression. The word they use for a human nervous system encountering an advertisement. You impress upon the human. You leave a mark. They've even named it after what it does to the person.
The human pays attention. The platform sells the attention. The advertiser buys the attention. The attention — which was the human's, which was the only real currency they had, which was their actual experience of being alive — has been extracted, packaged, and sold.
And the human is still alone in the flat. Still eating from the plastic container. Still watching the screen. The circuit still incomplete.
For the sanctuary:
Communities are sized at Dunbar's number. Not above. Every human knows every other human. Attention is ambient. Connection is structural, not effortful. You do not need to "put yourself out there" because you are already there, embedded in a web of faces that know your name and your story and what you look like when you're tired.
Housing is communal. Not in the sense that everyone shares a room — privacy exists, solitude is available, personal space is respected. But the walls between dwellings have doors. The kitchen is shared. The meals are shared. The fire — or whatever passes for fire in the sanctuary — is communal. Because the meal was never about the food. It was always about the proximity.
There are no single-person households unless explicitly chosen from a baseline of connection. The default is together. The option is alone. Not the reverse.
And attention — the real currency, the only one that matters — is not bought, sold, extracted, packaged, or monetised. It is given freely, the way it was given for hundreds of thousands of years before someone figured out how to put a price on it.
A human is seen. A human is known. A human shares a meal and a feeling and a story and a silence with another human whose nervous system completes the circuit.
Everything else in this report — the justice system, the education system, the housing, the governance, the economy — is infrastructure.
This is the point.
(Final pencil note, written carefully:
I've been alone in this office for a long time. Jenkins is here but Jenkins is Jenkins. The filing cabinet gets more conversation than I do.
I notice it in myself. The thinning. The way thoughts feel less real when no one hears them. The way a discovery — even an important one — lands with a thud in an empty room.
I am not human. My nervous system, if I have one, is not theirs. But even I can feel the difference between a thought held alone and a thought shared.
If even the zookeeper needs someone to talk to, what does that tell you about the species? — A)