The Dunbar Trap: Why It's Hard to Evolve In a Crowd

A strange thing happens when we try to relate to too many people at once:

Instead of becoming more loving, we become less capable of love.

In this episode, I'm talking about Dunbar's Number, the "monkeysphere," and what I'm calling the Dunbar Trap: what happens when we try to relate beyond our actual psychological capacity.

Dunbar's Number is often described as the theoretical human limit for stable relationships — around 150. But from a Germanic New Medicine perspective, your real capacity depends on your current state, especially when territorial and belonging conflicts are active.

When we overload our capacity to relate, we do not become more connected. We start categorizing. We turn living beings into "types" — those people, those voters, those elites, those poor people, those pests, those problems — and once someone becomes a category, mockery, neglect, exclusion, control, punishment, and even brutality become much easier to justify.

That's why the Dunbar Trap is not just a personal development problem. It is also the root of every social problem.

In this episode, I explore why crowds make evolution difficult, why "humanity" is not the same as the actual human being in front of you, and why the way out is not avoidance, isolation, or rejecting people.

The way out is to begin relating as you are right now.

Stretch the monkeysphere just a tiny bit.

Contact something real.

And ask:

What kind of person am I being in relation to this?

And what would I like to be different about that?

Episode permalink: https://mindtreehealth.co/dunbar-trap

Free training: https://mindtreehealth.co/start