I saw an Instagram post yesterday about a guy who sold his company for $975 million and had feelings of being lost and depressed with no purpose. Despite having everything, he admitted he had no idea what to do with his life. It reminded me of John Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment – a man-made mouse utopia with unlimited resources that eventually collapsed into dysfunction and extinction from a loss of purpose. The parallels between that mouse society and ours feel more real than ever.

Let me give you some back story, in the late 1960s, American ethologist John B. Calhoun created what he believed to be a rodent utopia – an enclosed space with unlimited food, no predators, and all the comforts required for ideal mice life. The experiment, known as Universe 25, began with just eight healthy mice and ended in mass extinction. But not from disease, starvation or war, but from social decay.

What happened inside that 2.7-square-meter enclosure has since become one of the most thought-provoking metaphors for the fragility of modern society.

When Comfort Becomes a Curse

Universe 25 was paradise for rodents. The mice had food, shelter, clean living and no threats. The population doubled every 55 days. But soon, things turned dark. Clustering behavior led to the formation of social castes – aggressive alphas, withdrawn outcasts, and passive in-betweens. Violence took hold, mating ceased, mothers neglected or killed their young, and a generation emerged that had no concept of social roles.

Calhoun called them the beautiful ones, physically unscathed but emotionally and socially hollow. They groomed themselves obsessively, avoided interaction, and eventually stopped reproducing altogether. Population numbers flattened and then spun into extinction.

The Behavior Sink

Calhoun coined the term behavior sink to describe the collapse of social behaviors in overcrowded and overstimulated environments. The experiment caused serious reflection among city planners, sociologists, and governments.

Was Universe 25 a dark reality of a modern urban world? Could ease and abundance erode the very fabric of society?

By the 1970s, the parallels were already unsettling – global unrest, rapid urbanization, and cultural fragmentation all mirrored what Calhoun saw in his mouse society. Now, more than 50 years later, the picture feels even darker. Social media and AI have automated everything from labor to conversation, pushing more of our interactions behind screens and deepening social isolation. Calhoun’s experiment doesn’t just feel relevant – it feels like a preview.

Are We Headed That Way?

The questions Calhoun raised are still with us:

  • What happens when technological progress outpaces our psychological and social adaptation?
  • If people no longer need to work for survival, what gives life meaning?
  • Can societies survive when traditional roles like parent, worker, neighbor lose their value significance?

Calhoun wasn’t sounding the doomsday alarm. If anything, he believed humans have what mice don’t, the ability to reflect, adapt, and build better systems. We have tools at our disposal like creativity, empathy, and the capacity to plan for the future. We’re not confined by the walls of an experiment. If we’re willing to understand the past and Calhoun’s experiment we can reimagine how we live, work, and interact and thus reshape the future.

But we have to want to. And that is where I put on my pessimistic cap because I believe given the opportunity most would retreat from the physical world like in the 2009 movie Surrogates with Bruce Willis where we lived our lives through robot-controlled bodies.

And another nod from pop culture comes from the scene in the Matrix Reloaded where Neo meets the Architect, the creator of the Matrix, and he explains the first Matrix failed because it was too perfect. It was devoid of suffering and struggle; which humans subconsciously need to feel and experience. He revealed that humans, in this utopia, lacked a sense of choice and agency, ultimately rejecting the “perfect” world.

The retrospect was the collapse of Universe 25 inevitable?

Was it a warning?

Does a perfectly designed environment fail not because of scarcity, but because of excess without connection?

In the end, the mice didn’t die from hunger or predators. They died because they lacked meaning and purpose.