25 Lessons: Introduction
There are currently somewhere over 8 billion people alive on Earth, spread across 200 countries, speaking over 7,000 languages, and believing in over 4,000 religions. Just a century ago, in the 1920s, the global population was around 2 billion people and scientists were just starting to work out what viruses and quantum physics were.
A hundred years ago, astronomers thought the Universe was infinitely old and made up of the Milky Way, estimating a distance of about 300,000 light years across. Today, NASA says that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old, that its furthest reaches extend all the way out to 92 billion light years, that it contains perhaps 2 trillion galaxies and that there might be 100 billion stars in our Milky Way alone.
Our closest galactic neighbour, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away: if we could somehow travel in a magical spaceship at the speed of light (which we can’t), it would still take us two-and-a-half million years to get there. As far as we currently know, and as the famous Pale Blue Dot image magnificently illustrated in 1990, Earth is the only tiny spaceship, the only spot in the whole Universe, with biological life on it.
And somehow, we humans are aware of those facts and our own existence.
If we go back just another century in our timeline, to the 1820s, the global population was around 1 billion people and steam engines, railways, steam ships, street lighting powered by gas lamps, and the mass urbanisation and factories of the Industrial Revolution were just being invented and built in English, Belgian and French cities.
Almost everything we now consider to be normal modern life—electricity, phones, education, modern medicine and healthcare, modern agriculture, mass media, the scientific exploration of all fields of human endeavour, television, radio, nuclear energy and weapons, cars, computers, the Internet, climate change, human rights, air travel, Bitcoin—had not yet even started to happen just two hundred years ago.
It took us a century to grow from one billion to two billion humans but between the 1920s and the 2020s, we added six billion more people, despite two massive World Wars. While UN population projections show overall growth is slowing, we are still on course to reach 10 billion human beings alive on the planet this century, perhaps as early as 2050. There are currently eight times as many humans alive as there were 200 years ago and, in the blink of a historical eye, there will be ten times as many.
And while the mass of the Earth does apparently change slightly over very long periods of time, and we are now more aware of the size of the Universe on the very large extreme of life and more aware of quantum physics on the very small end of life, our home planet is the same size as it was in 1800. It is still 12,756 kilometres across at the equator and we are still 150 million kilometres from the Sun.
Although we mostly don’t stop to think about such things as we rush about our 21st Century lives, we are all living through, we are all alive in, an unprecedented age of human population growth, longevity, connection, culture, communication, globalisation, economy, technology and knowledge, compared to all previous historical periods, and progress has been exponential.
Nobody was measuring what today we call GDP (gross domestic product, economic activity) 200 years ago, when mass industrialisation and urbanisation were just getting underway in Europe and most people on the planet still lived in some version of local villages with local farming economies, but the most recent estimates suggest around a $1 trillion total global economy back then, versus $114 trillion today.
The creation and distribution of all of the world’s wealth (estimated at $700 trillion in total in 2025) over the period of modern industrial and financial capitalism has occurred in a very uneven manner, across countries and within them. Today, just two countries, the United States and China, account for 42% of all global GDP. Only eight other countries (Japan, Germany, India, Italy, Brazil, Canada, the UK, France) manage more than 2% of the total.
The 39th annual Forbes list of the world’s billionaires found a record 3,028 very rich humans in 2025, with a total net wealth of $16.1 trillion. While assets are not GDP, for an idea of the magnitude of the numbers we are talking about, the world’s individual billionaires control wealth between them that is similar in size to the annual economic output of Japan, Germany, the UK and India combined.
The single wealthiest individual currently alive, Elon Musk, is approaching the $500 billion level of net worth all by himself, which means it would take him 1,369 years to spend it all at the rate of $1 million a day. At the bottom end of the human wealth pile, 700 million people still somehow live below the poverty line; 2.2 billion people do not yet have access to clean drinking water every day; and 2.3 billion people do not have access to the Internet, never mind AI. Which is also to say, there are more than twice as many people without access to regular clean water and an Internet connections today as there were alive in 1800.
All of that economic development, population growth and human activity has had a negative effect on the climate of our unique planet. In 1800, the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere stood at around 285 ppm (parts per million), approximately the level it had been at for at least the previous several hundred millenia. In 2025, after just two centuries of intense human population growth and modern economic activity, we have already reached as high as 431 ppm. 2024 was the warmest year on record, for many months more than 1.5ºC warmer than the middle of the 19th century.
So given that there are more of us, spread across so many countries, languages and religions, with more complexity, more wealth, more inequality and more impact on our little planet than ever before, our individual and collective behaviour, beliefs, ideas, choices, habits, interactions, communication and activities would seem to be an important topic to understand better. Each of us is alive, has a life, gets the same 24 hours each day, from whatever relative position we hold in a society somewhere, and we each do some things based on some ideas that then have some results and effects.
Philosophy, religious and mystical traditions across time and cultures have wondered about inner experience, consciousness, meaning, living a good life and how to live together in societies for millenia in different combinations of rational thought, metaphor, morality, narrative, poetry or parable, and the 19th and 20th centuries—our two-hundred year modern period—saw the birth of and then an explosion of interest in modern neuroscience, psychoanalysis, behavioural science, cybernetics, cognitive science and social science alongside the development of modern physics, chemistry and biology, which all concentrated mostly on some aspect of the outer experience.
The ancient religious traditions had no notion at all, of course, of what modern economic and technological life would be like for so many different human beings around the world while the modern scientific approaches are necessarily constrained by their need to stick as closely as possible to the modern scientific paradigm of observable, repeatable, testable, falsifiable external experimental results, culminating in what is termed the “hard problem of consciousness”, namely that objective modern science does not have much to say about the subjective inner experiences all humans know we have, versus the physical functioning of our brains or the observable results of our actions, for example, and nor does it have much to say about why a rose smells like a rose, what the colour red really is or what it feels like to be a bat or an elephant.
In the meantime, the difficulties of practical life on the planet do not stop, on an individual, business, investment, political, economic or international level, and it would seem like some of the newer global challenges in this our 21st century, such as climate change, the rise of smartphones and social media, the Covid pandemic or now our collective herding into the AI era are extremely complex, difficult to comprehend, problematic to reach agreement on and very hard to adapt to but nevertheless increasingly affect us all, all 8 billion of us, in the 200 countries and several thousand languages and religions.
As a complex, multi-layered, multi-cultural, multi-lingual global society, we have undergone 200 years of exponential change to every aspect of external human life that was previously known by history, all while the inner experience and mechanisms of human nature, emotions or meaning creation appear to work in the same timeless manner that they did thousands of years ago. Then there are the important questions of how ideas, desires and behaviours spread across human groups and whole societies in some direction over time, with some proportionally larger outcome, for better or for worse, in whatever the situation is.
With Human Loops and these 25 Lessons, I propose a fractal, scale invariant descriptive framework for observing, analysing and imagining human behaviour, individually and collectively at different levels, that takes into account both our inner experience and the accumulation of outer results in different directions, across all fields of human life and endeavour. It doesn’t matter which country you live in, which language you speak or which religion you follow.
The multiple layers of unfolding events, situations and patterns in our lives, and how we end up there, provide us with a rich opportunity to better understand ourselves, the people we meet and our societies and relationships as a whole, and then to perhaps even do something to improve them. We are all emotional human beings with some version of limited resources attempting to respond in some way to the pressures and structures of life wherever we are. Our choices and actions—and the results we obtain—are based on whatever identities, attitudes and baggage we have accumulated over the course of our own particular life adventures here on Earth.
Matthew Bennett
[Last Updated: October, 2025]
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