Abstract
Four billion years of self-preserving chemistry built a stress system designed to activate and then finish, and then grew a cortex that keeps it switched on indefinitely. This essay follows what happens next: how unresolved threat accumulates as allostatic load, how the brain turns down its own interoception to stay functional, and how a civilization raised inside that dampening learned to read it as health. At the center stands the clinician, shaped by a pipeline that reproduces the same dimming, then asked to measure everyone else's distance from a baseline no one in the room currently occupies.