I know I was not alone in being wired that way, obviously not a conversation you have with random strangers, but in conversation with people I know well, it would appear it's fairly common in the world we live in. Or perhaps I've just got a uniquely disfunctional group of friends hah. But, work on the Meaning Crisis as John Vervaeke calls it, increases in mental health issues, and declining birth rates, lead me to believe this is endemic.
I've been fortunate to have been able to spend the past 15 months fucking off and looking inside to wrestle with this and I'm fairly convinced our HumanOS or whatever you want to call it, the ego, is no longer fit for purpose for a lot of people in modernity.
Before I go further, I'll acknowledge that our ego has served us well for most of human history, it's driven progress to this point that has, for a large swath of the population, eliminated hunger, and we're much more secure than we've ever been generally.
But, I'd argue it's become increasingly problematic since somewhere around The Enlightenment / Scientific Revolution, very problematic in the past 100 years or so, and quite frankly, supercharged since the advent of the internet, smart phones, and social media.
Our ancient ancestors were influenced by people in their immediate orbit, and it was a symbiotic relationship of sorts, everyone had a vested interest in the success of those around them and vice versa. As our society has evolved, this alignment has dwindled, and with the advent of the internet, we're constantly being blasted by attempts to influence us, that no longer have our best interest at heart, but our programming hasn't caught up.
So now, this programming that once provided a stable sense of self, is now constantly being blasted with conflicting ideas of the self, it's increasingly difficult to keep the inner and outer world in alignment, and well, the ego is an engine that is burning up. For a lot of us, this manifests with the negative self talk that we'll all do anything we can to avoid, and one of the most effective ways to do so, is to avoid being idle, anything we can do to keep the mind focused outward rather than inward.
Those of us that are alive today don't have the luxury of waiting for evolutionary pressures to 'solve' this problem for future generations. In my personal experience, the solution seems to be waking up to these machinations of ego. Don't fully understand how it works, but it seems that awareness of said machinations can act as a recursive loop to silence them.