Most of us sense it, even if we can’t always put it into words: life keeps getting more complicated. Every year brings more forms to fill out, more apps to master, more passwords to remember, and more rules we’re expected to follow. For many people, it feels like the world is being built for somebody else—and in a way, it is.
Our civilization is designed and managed by a relatively small group of very smart, highly educated people. Engineers, lawyers, policy experts, and administrators—people with advanced degrees and gifted intellects—spend their working lives building the systems that the rest of us depend on: financial services, government regulations, contracts, websites, medical protocols. They spend their days talking to one another in technical language and assuming that what is clear to them should be clear to everyone.
No one is deliberately trying to exclude ordinary people. But there is a hidden bias built into the way our world is designed. Because the designers and managers are trained to think in specialized complex ways, they naturally create systems that make sense to them. The result is a world full of complexity that often overwhelms the very people it is supposed to serve.
Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Maze
Now imagine stepping into the shoes of an average citizen (not hard to do?). You finished high school, you work hard, and your strengths are practical. Maybe your IQ is around 90—not uncommon at all.
Here’s what daily life looks like:
- Navigating the web means confronting dozens of privacy agreements that nobody reads and websites with no consistent rules.
- Legal and financial documents are written in a language only specialists can understand.
- Health care instructions assume a high level of literacy and comfort with medical terms.
- Politics feels like a shouting match where nothing really makes sense.
For many, admitting confusion feels like admitting weakness. So people quietly cope by sticking with familiar brands, trusting friends and family, or avoiding tough decisions altogether.
Even the Experts Feel It
Educated professionals talk about living in a “VUCA” world—one that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. If eventhey feel swamped, what hope is there for everyone else?
For most people, the problem is not just information overload. It’s life overload—a constant sense of being one step behind, never fully catching up. The stress of trying to cope only adds to fatigue, which further reduces mental sharpness. In this way, complexity can actually drive down effective intelligence across the population.
Specialization Doesn’t Save Us
One of the ironies of our modern world is that even the so-called “experts” are ordinary people outside their narrow fields. A brilliant cardiologist may be utterly lost when reading a tax form. A skilled software engineer may have no idea how to navigate a legal contract.
Specialization helps us manage complexity in slices, but it doesn’t solve the bigger problem: we’ve built a civilization so complicated that no one—no matter how smart or educated—can fully understand it. In most areas of life, each of us is a novice. The supposed divide between the “elites” and the “ordinary people” may not be as wide as it appears, though the burdens fall hardest on those with fewer resources and less training.
The Consequences of a Cognitive Mismatch
The gap between how the world is built and how most people navigate it has serious effects:
- Civic disengagement: Politics feels incomprehensible, so many citizens stop paying attention—or fall for simplistic slogans.
- Consumer vulnerability: People sign contracts they don’t understand or fall prey to scams.
- Health risks: Misunderstood prescriptions and instructions lead to real harm.
- Mistrust: When systems feel impossible to grasp, suspicion grows. Conspiracy theories can seem more believable than official explanations.
This creates a dangerous spiral: complexity grows, people grow more fatigued, and in response experts add even more complicated solutions. Each turn of the spiral pushes ordinary people further to the margins.
A System Designed Beyond Human Limits
This is not a matter of individual intelligence. It’s a structural problem, a deep systemic bias. Our civilization has scaled beyond the cognitive carrying capacity of most human beings. For most of history, daily life matched the abilities of ordinary people. Today, even routine acts—shopping for health insurance, filing taxes, or navigating digital platforms—require skills that once belonged only to elites.
In short, the world has outgrown us.
What Can Be Done?
We don’t have to accept this mismatch as inevitable. There are ways to make our systems more human-friendly:
- Radical simplification: Write laws, contracts, and instructions at a middle-school reading level.
- Standardization: Develop universal design principles—like traffic signs—for digital and legal life.
- Mediating intelligence: Use AI or trusted cooperatives to translate complexity into plain language.
- Subsidiarity: Push decision-making down to the lowest effective level to build and reinforce resilience, where problems are simpler and more relatable.
- Narrative reframing: Help people see where their choices still matter, so they don’t feel powerless.
Respecting the Struggle
If you sometimes feel lost in today’s world, you are not alone. The struggle is not a personal failing. It is the symptom of a deeper systemic bias: the world is being built for people who think differently than most of us.
The irony is that even experts are only experts in small slices of life. Outside their specialty, they too are ordinary. Recognizing that truth may be the first step toward rebuilding trust and designing systems that serve everyone.
Because in the end, a civilization that only works for the highly educated few will not work for long. The challenge of our time is to build a world that makes sense for all of us—not just the ones who designed it.
Randal Adcock 