We Are the Beautiful Ones

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a piece of 1960s mouse sociology. (A sentence I never thought I’d write. And yet, here we are.) It all started when I was at home, doomscrolling on Instagram, and a video about a mouse utopia hijacked my feed.

In 1968, an ethologist named John B. Calhoun built a perfect world. He called it “Universe 25.” It was a sterile Eden, engineered for perfection: unlimited food, no predators, no disease. Its purpose was to answer a haunting question. What happens when all the old struggles vanish?

The result was a catastrophe.

The population surged, but society did not. Calhoun documented the unraveling: “The social organisation of the animals showed equal disruption… The one activity most rapidly disrupted was the emergence of organised maternal behaviour.” Mothers abandoned their pups. The enclosure was filled with bodies, yet it was utterly emptied of purpose. He called this collapse the “behavioural sink,” a process that “collects animals together in unusually great numbers… [and] aggravate[s] all forms of pathology.”

The pathology wasn’t physical. It was social, spiritual, and total.

The most chilling figures were what Calhoun called “the beautiful ones.” He described them as “a few withdrawn males” who “never learned to respond to social stimuli” and spent their time “grooming themselves passively.” They looked perfect. They did nothing. The population, unable to function, collapsed. No recovery. No rebirth.

It’s a story about mice. But I read about them on my phone, surrounded by the conveniences of modern life, and felt a jolt of recognition. A mirror, held up.

Because Calhoun wasn’t subtle about the parallel. “I shall largely speak of mice,” he wrote, “but my thoughts are on man.” He saw in his dying rodents a warning for humanity, a phenomenon he called “the inward flight from reality.”

And my thoughts turn to us. Universe 25 didn’t collapse from scarcity. Calhoun was clear: “The mice were not dying from a lack of food or water.” It was a collapse of care. Of structure. Of shared purpose. Abundance without a social framework is a trap.

And when I look at my own framework, my “community” is a string of group chats. My “role” is a constantly shifting personal brand. My “bonds” are maintained by liking a story. It’s hard not to see the outlines of a digital Universe 25. We have all the comforts, yet a quiet sense of emptiness gathers in the corners of our screens. We are, in a sense, always grooming. Curating. Perfecting.

Calhoun framed the consequence in stark terms: “For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to a comparable second death… The first death is the death of the spirit, the second death is the inevitable sequel to the body.”

The technology we’ve built, the apps and the algorithms and the clever little AIs, won’t destroy us in some grand sci-fi spectacle. The danger is quieter. They promise to cushion us from every struggle, to smooth away every friction. But in that sterile comfort, they risk erasing the very things that make life worth living: meaningful challenge, real-world friction, and purpose that comes from something deeper than personal optimisation.

The lesson isn’t that we should reject our comforts. It’s that comfort alone is not a culture. Without the rituals, roles, and shared memories that truly bind us, we risk perfecting ourselves into a corner.

We may continue on, biologically, for a long time. But the question that keeps me up at night is whether we’re already, in the ways that matter most, beginning to disappear.