Back to the Ground
The kind of world humans were built for
Last month, we climbed a ladder.
We traced how the Agricultural Revolution pulled our minds into the future. How the Industrial Revolution disconnected our bodies from the work we did. How the Digital Revolution moved reality behind screens. And how the Intelligence Revolution is beginning to externalize thinking itself.
Four rungs. Four revolutions. Four layers of abstraction, each compounding the last.
By the end, we were standing at the top of the ladder, looking down at everything we’d climbed away from.
This month, we’re going back down.
Not to reject abstraction—we can’t, and we wouldn’t want to. But to understand what’s actually at the bottom. What we left behind. What the ladder is built on top of.
Because here’s what I didn’t fully explain in November: there’s something on the ground.
Not nothing. Not just “the past.” Not some romantic idea of simpler times.
There’s a specific kind of environment. A specific kind of cognition. A specific way of being human that was our default for over 95% of our species’ history.
And it has a name.
The World Before the Ladder
Anthropologist James Woodburn introduced a distinction in 1982 that changes how we understand human psychology: the difference between immediate-return and delayed-return environments.
In immediate-return environments, there’s little to no gap between effort and outcome. You hunt today, you eat today. You gather today, you eat today. The feedback loop is tight, fast, and unmistakably real.
In delayed-return environments—which includes virtually all of modern life—there’s a significant time lag between action and result. You plant seeds, you wait months. You go to school for years, then maybe get a job. You invest in retirement accounts for decades, hoping it pays off someday.
Here’s what matters: humans lived in immediate-return conditions for approximately 95% of our history as a species. The shift to delayed-return environments began only about 10,000 years ago with agriculture—a blink in evolutionary time.
Our brains, our nervous systems, our entire cognitive architecture evolved for a world that no longer exists.
And here’s what research is starting to reveal: the psychological struggles we treat as personal problems—anxiety, rumination, chronic stress, the inability to be present—may actually be predictable responses to living in environments our minds weren’t built for.
What Immediate-Return Life Actually Looked Like
This isn’t speculation. Anthropologists have studied communities living in immediate-return conditions, and what they’ve found challenges nearly everything we assume about the human mind.
The Pirahã of the Amazon rainforest live in what anthropologist Daniel Everett calls “immediacy of experience.” After three decades studying them, he discovered something remarkable: their language lacks words for worry, for distant future planning, for abstract time. They live entirely in the present—not as a spiritual achievement, but as a natural consequence of their environment.
Everett observed that by making the immediate their focus, the Pirahã eliminate what he called “huge sources of worry, fear, and despair that plague so many of us in Western societies.”
No meditation retreat required. No mindfulness app. Just an environment that doesn’t demand constant mental time travel.
The Mbuti of the Ituri Rainforest demonstrate something similar. Anthropologist Colin Turnbull, after three years of immersive study, found their worldview dominated by the present moment. He recorded statements like: “If it is not here and now, what does it matter where or when it is?”
For the Mbuti, attempting to predict the future was seen as foolish—like “walking blindly.” They viewed speculation about things not directly experienced with amusement, as if it was a waste of time and energy. Those who claimed knowledge of inherently unknowable abstract concepts, such as the afterlife, were seen as having “loose heads.”
The Pintupi of Australia offer perhaps the most striking example. Despite transitioning to somewhat more delayed-return conditions due to environmental pressures, they maintained intense present-moment awareness as a core cultural value. Anthropologist Fred Myers characterized their world as “dominated by immediacy.”
Here’s what stood out to me when I first read this: among the Pintupi, the inability to maintain awareness of the present moment—having an overly busy or preoccupied mind—is considered a sign of immaturity or even mental illness.
Read that again.
The mental state we consider normal—the wandering mind, the constant planning, the inability to stay present—is viewed in immediate-return cultures as a kind of cognitive dysfunction.
What if they’re right?
The Wandering Mind Reconsidered
The famous Harvard study by Killingsworth and Gilbert found that people spend about 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re currently doing. Their conclusion: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
This finding has been cited thousands of times. It launched a billion-dollar mindfulness industry. It became evidence that humans are somehow broken, that we need to be fixed, that presence is a skill we must train.
But the environmental model suggests something different.
Mind-wandering isn’t a bug. It’s an adaptation.
When you live in a delayed-return environment—when feedback on your efforts is months or years away—your brain has to do something to cope. It has to simulate futures, model scenarios, estimate whether you’re on track for goals you can’t directly verify.
Psychologist Leonard Martin calls this “I-D Compensation Theory.” Humans evolved with an innate need for immediate feedback. When environments became delayed-return, we developed what Martin calls “delayed-return skills” to compensate: mental simulation, future-scenario modeling, abstract thinking, rumination.
These aren’t disorders. They’re coping mechanisms.
The problem isn’t that we developed this capacity. The problem is that we can never turn it off—because our environments never stop demanding it.
The Pirahã don’t need mindfulness training because their environment doesn’t require constant mental time travel. The Mbuti aren’t more spiritually evolved; they just live in conditions that don’t suppress presence.
We’ve been trying to fix the mind when the issue is the environment.
What This Means for Us
I want to be careful here. This isn’t noble savage romanticism. Immediate-return life involved real hardships, real limitations, real suffering that modern life has reduced.
And we can’t go back. The ladder exists. Agriculture, industry, digital technology, AI—they’re not going away. Nor should they.
But understanding what’s on the ground changes everything about how we interpret our own experience.
That chronic anxiety you feel? That’s not a personal failing. That’s a nervous system designed for immediate feedback, forced to operate in a world of perpetual uncertainty.
That inability to stay present? That’s not weakness. That’s a brain doing exactly what delayed-return environments demand—running simulations because direct feedback isn’t available.
That moment on a hike when your mind finally quieted? That wasn’t you achieving a special state. That was your nervous system recognizing something familiar—an environment closer to what it evolved for.
The baseline we’re trying to return to through meditation, therapy, retreats, and apps? It used to be our default.
What Creates the Ground
So if the environment matters this much, what specifically about immediate-return environments cultivates this natural presence?
My research has identified four factors—four characteristics that distinguish immediate-return from delayed-return environments, and that explain why presence emerges naturally in one and requires constant effort in the other.
Over the next four weeks, we’ll explore each one:
Immediate feedback. When effort and outcome touch directly, your mind doesn’t need to simulate. It can simply be here.
Experiential learning. When you learn by watching and doing rather than abstract instruction, you develop a different kind of attention—wide, sustained, embodied.
Natural environments. Your nervous system evolved in nature. It reads the absence of natural cues as potential danger. The built environment isn’t neutral—it’s actively depleting.
Interconnected self-construal. How you see yourself—as separate or connected, as identified with your thoughts or broader than them—shapes whether presence is supported or suppressed.
These aren’t random factors. They work together. They reinforce each other. And they explain why certain experiences—time in nature, working with your hands, authentic social connection, activities with immediate feedback—feel so different from the rest of modern life.
They’re not luxuries. They’re not self-care. They’re the conditions your mind was built for.
The December Project
November was about seeing the ladder. Understanding how we climbed it, rung by rung, revolution by revolution.
December is about understanding what’s on the ground.
Not to idealize the past. Not to reject the present. But to recognize that the disconnection, anxiety, and chronic abstraction we experience aren’t personal failures to be fixed.
They’re predictable responses to environments that violate nearly every condition our minds evolved for.
And once you see that, something shifts.
You stop blaming yourself for struggling to be present in a world designed to prevent presence.
You start understanding why certain experiences—nature, craft, embodied work, real human connection—feel like coming home.
And you begin to see a path forward: not abandoning abstraction, but learning to move intentionally up and down the ladder. Abstract when you need to. Grounded when you can be. With the capacity for both.
That’s where January will take us: alive in the age of AI—how to harness abstraction while staying human.
But first, we need to know what we’re trying to protect.
See you next week, when we explore the first factor: what happens when effort and outcome actually touch.
—James
Note on AI collaboration: The ALIVE Letter explores how humans can stay fully human while learning to work with modern technology. In that same spirit, I collaborate with AI in the creation of these articles. As an industrial/organizational psychologist who studies human-AI collaboration, I carefully guide, refine, and evaluate AI outputs. At its best, this partnership helps me more clearly and authentically communicate my own thoughts and perspectives than I am able to alone.
Walking blindly — what a phrase
Nicely done once more James