Why Humans Keep Tripping Over Their Own Minds
The human brain was never built for clarity, truth, or wisdom. It wasn’t designed for careful reflection or objective judgement. It was designed for survival — to react quickly, to avoid danger, to preserve energy, and to keep us vaguely acceptable to whichever tribe we happened to belong to. In this pursuit of survival, evolution handed us a mind packed with shortcuts, emotional guesswork, half-baked assumptions, and endless self-deception — and then left us to pretend we’re highly advanced creatures of logic.
At the heart of the Nincompoop philosophy sits a deeply inconvenient truth: humans don’t think clearly by default. They stumble through life on autopilot, cutting corners wherever possible, and feel oddly proud of the fragile stories they build to explain themselves. Most people, most of the time, are not thinking — they are reacting, guessing, copying others, or rationalising after the fact. They believe they see reality as it is, when in fact they see reality filtered through layers of bias, fear, and mental shortcuts that constantly distort the picture.
The problem is not that some people are broken while others are sound. It is that all of us are built from the same defective machinery — a survival-driven system of thought that can’t help but glitch. We avoid uncomfortable facts, we cherry-pick evidence that suits us, we project our emotions onto others, and we follow the herd because it feels safer than standing alone. The same flawed systems that help us navigate daily life are the very ones that cause conflict, delusion, dysfunction and suffering. The only real difference between one person and the next is how far these systems have spun out of control.
What we often call “mental illness” or “toxic behaviour” is simply what happens when these everyday glitches become amplified. One person’s anxiety is another person’s natural tendency to worry taken too far. One person’s narcissism is another person’s basic need for validation pumped up to a blinding level. One person’s tribalism is another person’s need for belonging hardened into total loyalty and hostility. The underlying mechanics are the same. The dial settings are what differ.
This is why the Nincompoop philosophy rejects the tidy division between the “healthy” and the “unhealthy,” the functional and the dysfunctional. There is no “other.” There is only one system — and we are all running on it. Your worst moment is not categorically different from someone else’s permanent state; it’s simply a variation in scale.
The purpose of the Nincompoop lens is not to cure human nature or to create some utopian vision of perfect rationality. That would be like expecting a chicken to master physics. The goal is far more honest: to acknowledge the mess for what it is, to manage the inherent flaws of being human, and to build a little grace and self-awareness into how we deal with ourselves and each other.
We are all Nincompoops. The sooner we admit it, the more functional — and oddly peaceful — life becomes.