Is rising complexity might overwhelm fixed cognitive capacity.

A consideration.

We live in a world that is immensely complex and becoming more so through greater connectedness, more data, and rising comprehension about loosely coupled causal effects.  

Our brains remain biologically constrained by historical evolution and current condition.  

It would seem that rising complexity might overwhelm fixed cognitive capacity.

However, in the past ten thousand years (from hunter gatherer to agriculturalist to urban dwellers) we had the same experience of rising complexity to be dealt with by the same fixed biological instrument (the brain.)

My suspicion is that we dealt with that rising complexity in the past via the intertwining of culture and institutions.  Any single person (or brain) did not have to deal with the full impact of rising complexity.  It was distributed across the group.

Further, culture (an aggregation of experiential hacks and knowledge shortcuts) evolved to accommodate rising complexity.  Culture can evolve faster than biology.

Why are we experiencing rising anxiety in our modern era when everyone is better off, safer, healthier and better formally educated than at any time in the past?

I see two possibilities:

1 - The rate of change has accelerated and has overwhelmed the existing buffers to that change.  Moore's Law has torpedoed our cultural buffering.

2 - Alternatively, culture may still be effective, it is just that fewer people are being effectively culturalized than in the past.  Fewer people with a religious grounding.  Fewer people in intact functioning families.  Fewer people with settled mores.  

Maybe it is both.  And maybe there are other contributors.

Or perhaps nothing has changed.  We are better able to communicate our anxieties to everyone today but in fact we may be just as anxious today as in 1000 AD, as in 0 AD, etc.  Maybe the problem is only imagined and not real.