People had no trouble offering their thoughts on the greatest faults of humankind, so here are some of the best responses:
1. "Not caring for the environment."
2. "Dropping the first nuclear bomb before the first nuclear reactor came online. Scarred our collective psyche so bad we continue to ignore the best energy generation we know of."
3. "Organized religions."
4. "The 24-hour inundation of constant news and other information is too much for people to handle."
5. "Enslaving people."
6. "The biggest is probably intensive agriculture. We had a really good thing going for hundreds of thousands of years, and then we accelerated all of our problems when civilizations started to produce more food than they needed to survive."
"This fueled other excesses, but mostly it fueled rapid population growth which in turn exploded the need for land, which in turn utilized massive slave labor and led to violent clashes and wars over territory, and so on and so forth..."
7. "Social media. Good on paper, terrible in practice."
8. "Idolizing the hustle culture."
9. "THE BURNING OF THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA — I NEED TO KNOW WHAT WAS IN THERE, I HAVE TO!"
10. "The 9-to-5 workday."
11. "Pop-up ads."
12. "Forgetting that we're all in this together. Not just humans, everything is connected and we affect each other one way or another."
13. "Being okay with a few thousand people controlling most of the wealth."
14. "The way society defines success. We're taught from a young age that having more money and possessions makes us more successful, leading people to do all kinds of evil shit that harms others."
15. "Our prison system — your punishment is prison, but it continues way after your sentence."
16. "Adding lead to gasoline because we could not be bothered to design engines the right way has got to be up there...humanity literally got dumber as a consequence."
17. "Overpopulation. The Earth can't recover quickly enough from the damage we cause."
18. "Frankly, I don’t think we should have left the ocean."
Which of these opinions do you agree or disagree with? Share your own theories about humankind's worst mistakes in the comments below!
Responses have been edited for length/clarity.