[Derpdiherp]

"Newer generations born in the now dysfunctional mouse utopia became withdrawn, spending their days grooming obsessively and dedicating their time solely to eating , drinking and sleeping. This generation, for all the emphasis they placed on grooming, would not reproduce. Moreover, these mice were noted to be unintelligent compared to previous generations."

Intelligence has surely risen in our population, obesity is becoming a real problem in successful populations. The "selfie" self absorbed cultural shift we're seeing at the moment is another parallel.

Whilst we're not cannibalising each other or becoming any more aggressive than we have been in the past (although we are still plenty aggressive), I think we are starting to see some of symptoms for lack of a better term that are highlighted above to some degree or another.

Edit - perhaps there are also similarities between the hikikomori NEET lifestyle that's arisen in Japan as well.

This is purely an opinion without any statistics to back it up though, I'd be interested to hear counter arguments.

[projektir]

Getting obese seems like the opposite of excessive grooming. Most of the tendencies you're talking about are not happening in the overpopulated areas. The selfie thing is hugely overblown, a lot of people may be self-absorbed, but what says that's new, and a lot of people are also depressed.

The mice thing is not a utopia, it's an extremely artificial situation that only fits a very banal and shallow definition of "utopia". And that is not and probably never will be a situation humans will find themselves in since it requires a third party to engineer. None of us right now are in a closed environment, and we're definitely not in a no scarcity situation, since people are still worried about holding a job. The NEET thing is, too, related to the whole job thing.

In what way are these situations at all related?

[Derpdiherp]

I think you're reading into the term "utopia" too much. The experiment was a utopia of the body perhaps where there are no biological needs that aren't satisfied with no external forces of nature acting to reduce population aside from the size of the habitat that the rats lived in - as you mention we do not live in a utopia as people do grow hungry and are lacking jobs.

It also was not a utopia because the rats clearly where not happy.

I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations - but I haven't provided numbers there and neither have you - so both of our arguments are anecdotal.

As an aside I was more referencing the hikikomori phenomenon when I mentioned NEET's - whilst they are NEET, they are extreme cases of social withdrawl and other mental problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori