Unhappiness & Its Causes

Coppin opened with a group mind-melding exercise: ask the audience to imagine the most advanced human being on the planet, the person we would send to represent our species to aliens, and see whether the room could reach consensus. After the joke settled, he turned the point: even our most advanced minds still think, act, and decide like cave people. Biases, heuristics, System One intuition, and evolutionary wiring still drive hundreds of decisions a day. The goal of that wiring was to thrive, procreate, and survive, but modern life has only existed for a tiny fraction of our evolutionary history.

He framed modern unhappiness as a set of evolutionary mismatches. Physical mismatches from the Agricultural Revolution (diseases from living close to domesticated animals) and from the industrial and information ages (the leading killers today, plus even tooth decay almost absent from the fossil record). His specialism: psychological mismatches, anxiety, stress, and depression, which evolved for useful reasons but now appear at levels and extents that no longer fit the environments we built.

Every talk at the conference, he argued, was ultimately about addressing some form of mismatch between ancient brains and modern conditions.

The first of Coppin's three Cs is community. He contrasted historic settlement patterns, family courtyards in Middle Eastern towns, circular villages, English village greens, with how cities are built today. Belonging is the consistent academic through-line of community, and institutions that once held tribes together (shared workplaces for decades, local congregations, living near family) have eroded.

He linked belonging to uniquely human empathy cues: visible sclera (whites of the eyes) that enable gaze-following and shared attention, and Michael Tomasello's cooperation research showing three-year-olds share equitably where chimpanzees do not. Humans are poor at self-regulation alone, but strong at regulation for "we", contribution to the group.

The second C is contribution. Coppin told the story of his young son Ollie trying to help with washing up during a rushed school run, and of how adults often shut down children's offers to contribute for lack of time. Research shows three-year-olds will abandon a new toy to help a stranger pick something up, altruism and the drive to contribute are early and deep.

Drawing on Indigenous elder Manuel in Katherine, he argued that forager societies integrate adolescents with adults at puberty, while modern societies often segregate teens exactly when they most need adult models. Mitch Prinstein's distinction between likability (earned through contribution) and status (often unearned) framed why teens emulate peers for status when adults withdraw, and why contribution builds the self-worth required to handle comparison.

The third C is comparison. Comparison accelerates learning, but social media turns it into a stick we beat ourselves with. For most of human history we compared ourselves to a few dozen or a few hundred people; now we compare ourselves to billions, the fastest, fittest, richest, most successful, producing a predictable sense of inadequacy (what Coppin called a "Kardashian complex").

Without self-worth built through contribution, people lack the resilience to be vulnerable under that comparison. Online anonymity amplifies negativity bias and trolling. Tall poppy syndrome, he noted, appears across forager societies as an egalitarian check, hunters are brought down gently when heads get too big, and works when self-worth is already secure. Modern status culture often does the opposite.

Coppin closed with three As. First, awareness: naming the three Cs changes behaviour, for example questioning whether a third mortgage is worth time taken from family. Second, harness business and government incentives: fiscal levers and tax incentives for firms that strengthen community and wellbeing, creating an upward spiral of lower healthcare, education, and incarceration costs. Third, time: spend more time learning your strengths and virtues and giving them to your communities, matched by genuine top-down government commitment, the route back to meaning and purpose as the root of societal happiness.