Why We’re So Miserable
The Hidden Costs and Benefits of Being Human
One of the hidden costs of being human is that our DNA is specifically engineered to keep us striving for bigger and better. It is insatiable and only offers us brief moments of happiness or joy to keep us sufficiently motivated but brief enough to keep making us want more. In this sense, our DNA is our drug dealer, and we are addicted to dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, and endocannabinoids. In exchange for this mildly euphoric cocktail of drugs, we push ourselves to better protect ourselves, procreate, and acquire more resources for our children who themselves are manipulated and controlled by their DNA drug dealers. As much as we would like to think that we are our own masters, perhaps it is sad to say that our DNA are our masters and we are but subordinate indentured servants who are fed drugs to keep us perpetuating this guest cornucopia of genes that possesses every living thing on Earth and perhaps beyond.
One of the hidden benefits of being human is the incredible amount of investment our DNA has made in making us social beings. Of all the reasons our natural drugs are released, the biggest reason by far is social interaction, feelings of belonging, love, value, and adoration. Because of this, we do our best to please others and be nice and ethical beings. We almost always identify with and support people of good character.
One of the hidden costs of being drug addicts is that it is rather easy to switch preferences from our natural mildly euphoric drugs to more artificial highly euphoric drugs. The key to doing this is to cut off our ability to produce natural mildly euphoric drugs, and the best way to do this is to disrupt our social interaction, downplay it, and discount it. We are raised to believe that it is better to sacrifice for our future by leading a more solitary life studying hard and not playing with friends. While certainly, we should spend time sacrificing for the future, many people become obsessed with the solitary life of studying hard and then working hard. As a result, they don’t get as much of the natural, mildly euphoric drugs their body produces and must replace this with the more artificial ones, starting with caffeine and Ritalin and leading to addictions to junk food and artificial drugs both prescription and nonprescription. We are junkies one way or another, but the natural drugs make us more social whereas the artificial ones make us less social. The famous rat experiment where they seemed to prove that rats are easily addicted to drugs excluded one rather important variable. Some rats were put in a rather nice habitat filled with stimulating toys and other rats and then offered drugs. Those rats were much less likely to become addicted to the external drugs, instead choosing the internal drugs aroused by social stimulation and a stimulating physical environment.
One of the hidden costs of being human is that our social obsession can easily lead us astray. If someone takes over leadership of our social group, they can easily establish the wrong agenda and system to exploit everyone. Everyone is so obsessed with fitting in and pleasing one another, that they are reluctant to cause conflict and arouse discord by questioning leadership and existing cultural values, priorities, and direction. In other words, if the shady leader decides to create a culture and society that does nothing but serve a few people at the top, there will be very few people to question this while most people would be heavily invested in trying to make the fundamentally corrupt system work for them and their loved ones. Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened to the human race, to America, and to every large group you join.
On top of this, we are simply not designed to handle groups larger than about 150 people. For hundreds of thousands of years, we never lived in groups larger than 150 people. In smaller groups, we face the people we impact. In larger groups, we rarely ever face the people we impact, so our choices and decisions never are checked. If we pass a law putting drug users in prison, we never see them suffer in prison. We never see the causes of their drug addiction. In smaller groups, we would know every single person we put in prison, and we would know their friends and family, so that when their friends and family complain about how badly they are treated, we hear about it. We would start to realize that maybe prison is not the best answer for them but rather rehabilitation and continued support and contact with their friends and family.
In larger groups, we divide ourselves between me and them. We then treat the ‘them’ as scum and scoundrels who deserve their mistreatment. For example, few people truly care for the homeless and blame them for their condition. In small groups, there are no ‘them’ except any outsider. If someone you knew became homeless, you would either offer them a couch or try to help out in some way, because they are part of the ‘us.’ When you identify with someone as someone inside your group, you care a lot more about them than someone outside the group. In modern society, there is no us except a few close friends and family, and everyone else is a ‘them.’ As such, we are more than happy to pass laws and policies that are cruel and merciless to strangers, but we only worry when such laws and policies impact those who are close to us. Only then do we realize just how cruel and merciless those laws and policies are. I know someone who has become overwhelmed by medical bills for her son. It is now a lot more personal that I resent the healthcare cartel, price fixing and inflation, and corruption.
One of the hidden costs of our social obsession is that as much as we are motivated to please others and fit in, we are also obsessed with NOT being different, hurtful, and embarrassed. Our minds, therefore, constantly remind us of all our most embarrassing, shameful, or regretful moments. Peaceful moments to enjoy and appreciate our better moments and traits are crowded out by these constant reminders of our failures and shortcomings. While this makes us more vigilante about not being a jerk, unfortunately, in the long term, it can actually turn us into jerks. One way of turning off these constant reminders is to partake in intoxicating chemicals or activities that shut off our minds or prefrontal lobes at least. We can then enjoy living in the moment and not obsessing about the past or future. Unfortunately, when we start living in the moment, we also tend to discount the consequences of our actions and become more selfish. As a result of this, we wind up right back where we started, doing embarrassing or hurtful things that just give us more fuel for the constant reminders of our failures. In a vicious cycle, the more reminders we get, the more we try to escape them with intoxicants.
There is a theory that one way nature made us such incredibly social creatures is by suspending our maturity. When animals mature into adulthood, they are more reluctant to make new friends and social bonds and they are more suspicious and hostile toward the unfamiliar and foreign. By extending our period of youthfulness, we are more open to friendships throughout our lives and also learning new skills and tricks. Unfortunately, however, a hidden cost to this is our extended yearning for some adult supervisor or leader. A part of being young is depending heavily on a greater, smarter, wiser being. This is the root cause of much of humanity’s problems. That craving for a greater supervisor or parental figure has led us to become overly trusting and gullible of kings, religious leaders, deities, and today, the almighty and omnipresent government. The cost of being highly sociable and intelligent throughout most of our lives is also the misguided craving for someone to look over us, nurture us, protect us, and love us. And off we go, happily into the embrace of the worst demons of our worst nightmares, selfish, greedy, egotistical, power-mad assholes.
We also get confused by our desires and fears. We don’t realize that we crave things that are historically rare in our habitat and take for granted, often healthy things, that are historically common in our habitat. Take for instance carbs and fatty foods. We crave them, because historically, they have been very rare, yet they are filled with calories. Take for instance privacy. Living in small close groups, we hardly ever had a moment to ourselves, so we have an outsized craving for physical privacy, but what this does is make us desire living apart, separate, and away from others. We get exactly what we think we want, but we wind up so isolated and lonely, that we have to turn on the TV for background noise and spend all our time on social media for social stimulation. We also are not good at understanding abstract concepts versus physical objects. As much as we crave privacy, we don’t understand that someone spying on our social media and internet activities is a huge breach of our privacy. Just because we can’t see them, we don’t feel a breach of our privacy, but imagine if some dude were looking into your bedroom window writing down everything you did on social media and the Internet. Similarly, we don’t understand big numbers. A $100k credit card debt or a $22 trillion national debt mean nothing to us. This is why it’s so easy for us to get into credit card debt and support government spending. We don’t feel or sense the danger of the future where we end up paying huge interest on the debt individually and as a nation.
Perhaps at some point in the future, we will have one of two choices. We can manipulate ourselves so that we can achieve longer periods of happiness and gratitude for what we have. We can eat as much junk food without getting fat. We won’t have to work out, and nano-robots will stretch and build our muscles as we sleep. We will feel panic attacks when we accumulate credit card debt, and we’ll be able to sense the breach of privacy when something is monitoring our Internet activities. We would achieve this through manipulating our own DNA. But I just can’t get over the apprehension of the magic genie that always screws you over when you wish for something. The other path is keeping all our “faulty” DNA and simply changing our habitat to one that is more like the one we experienced for much of our evolution. I’m not talking about going back into the woods and wilderness but something that is more like that, living in groups of no more than 150 people, but with the accoutrements of some technology like video games, modern art, and modern music. I’m also fearful that perhaps we are living in the only moment in human history where we maximized technology while possessing our natural DNA, and the future is actually a bizarre and strange place where we are no longer technically humans, so in choosing to live our lives perpetually as humans, we choose to live in this age over and over and over again.
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