Has human progress outrun the human brain?
The conscious primate’s guide to the 21st century
“We keep forgetting that we are primates and that we have to make allowances for these primitive layers in our psyche.” — Carl Jung
For George and Casey… I hope you enjoy.
I looked around as I waited for the tram this morning, thinking about how futuristic our current world is.
Small trains move through the streets carrying people to their jobs where they sit at computers and beam 1s and 0s into the sky. People are on handheld computers, sending electronic mail across the world, listening to digital recordings of conversations, walking into a supermarkets and purchasing all the foods, herbs or spices they could ever want.
We are living in a sci-fi world, right now. But it can be hard to see the totality of the painting when one is standing only an inch away.
And this sci-fi reality is drastically different from what it would have looked like just a few hundred years ago.
It made me think, despite how different the world is, humans haven't changed so much.
But we expect ourselves, the same species, to thrive in this foreign world without intervention?
We're surprised when we feel depressed, anxious or overwhelmed. We seem to have forgotten that evolution takes millions of years, and that we're just not there yet.
We still need some time to get used to this new world.
We're like a grandma trying to use an iPhone!
And that’s creating a dissonance. A common suffering that seems to be happening to us all. It’s not just people going through horrible things, it's you and me. It's our siblings, our neighbours, our friends. Our fellow people.
And it's the disconnect between the futuristic world and our rudimentary species that's at the root of it.
But, we're not just any species.
There's a reason humans have dominated the animal kingdom, and come to this point. We're uniquely placed to adapt, fast. We have a secret weapon that can override physical challenges and supersede our animalistic ways.
Our minds. Our consciousness.
If we can find ways to be aware of the principles that are steering our ships, and create thought processes to navigate them, not only can we suffer less, but there’s a chance we could create ways to supercharge life, and have a better experience than almost any other being that has ever lived.
The French Professor (and the link between psychology and biology)
I was buying a TV second-hand from a guy called Patrice — a tall, slender man from France. Light-hearted, quirky and kind. His humour was sarcastic — and he loved to use it.
Patrice was originally from France, but moved to Japan at 23, where he taught psychology at university. He was strikingly smart with the jokes he made and the humility he carried himself with.
As we were leaving, we got stuck in conversation right at the door (a Turkish goodbye, as we call it).
He told us he was about to publish a book on the link between biology and psychology — "a missing piece", he said, "a very big missing piece!"
And this missing piece is what we could use to guide us through a better life.
When you feel scared, angry, happy, lustful, sad — any feeling — it can be explained by this link between biology and psychology.
For instance, lust. Lust is simply the species trying to grow — just like how the rabies virus makes its victims bite, or how a maple tree drops samara winged-seeds that float further away to spread the genome.
Now if you were to follow that lust every time it arised, you'd be living a complex and treacherous life filled with heartache, as well as having children to whom you couldn't provide the life they deserve.
So, you intervene.
Similarly, anxiety is our species trying to stay alive — a mouse will scurry away at even the smallest rustle in the bush. But if you were to run every time you felt anxious, you'd be living a life of fear.
So, you intervene.
Without intervention, you wouldn't achieve anything other than staying alive, which as we know, doesn't look like it used to.
Staying alive is no longer the challenge. We don't need to run from predators or physically find food and shelter anymore (at least in the first world).
But without these survival challenges, our species feels confused. We're not ready to just sit around and not do anything. We're not ready to sit on the couch, order our food to our doorstep and consume entertainment all day long. We're too close to our old selves.
So we need to be aware. We need to pay attention to ourselves and simulate things that feel familiar to us, and find ways to live a good life once again.
Thriving in the futuristic world
“Humankind as evolution becoming conscious of itself.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Let's take nutrition as an example.
We've studied nutrition to a point where we now harness and leverage it to our advantage — using turmeric for anti-inflammatory purposes, and zinc to help with our immune system. We optimise our micro and macronutrients to become as healthy as possible.
And this is the exact concept we could apply to Patrice’s psychology-biology connection to survive and thrive in this futuristic world.
Once we understand that every feeling is just a derivative of our survival mechanisms, they can be explained. And once the problem is identified, the solution becomes crystal clear.
We can reverse engineer our ancestral ways to overcome negative experiences and manufacture beneficial experiences — just like the popular trend of having cold showers to increase alertness and dopamine release.
When you feel anxious, ask yourself why. Your ancestors used anxiety to stay alert when there was a threat. Is something threatening you? Your ancestors would've walked a few kilometres at the least — have you left the house today?
When you feel inadequate, ask yourself why. If your primate ancestors were inadequate, this meant not finding a partner and the bloodline dying out. It's an evolutionary mechanism to motivate you to become a high value individual. Understand this, don't let it get to you and do something to improve yourself.
When you are sitting on your phone, or watching movies all day, ask yourself why you're doing it. Are you enjoying it, or are your ancestral traits of reward seeking being hijacked by the software and programs designed to keep you spending time on them?
The next phase of human evolution
“The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and ‘consciousness’ cannot evolve unconsciously.” — G. I. Gurdjieff
Your consciousness is the power you have to identify the root of your feelings, and reverse engineer a way through them.
You might find that identifying and explaining the feelings to yourself through biological means is enough to solve all the problems you have.
Simply understanding the ‘why’ can be more powerful than a solution.
And in tough, confusing times, just remember that you're just a primate who has stumbled upon a world with planes, trains, cars and the internet.
You might not be ready for it, but you are equipped with the ability to think your way through it.
Use your consciousness. Use your thinking. Use your mind.
This is our mutation.
This is the next phase of humanity.
Sincerely,
eren
Music of the Week
Some thoughtful, ethereal, pensive music…