I was pacing around the other day, as I often do (in the nude of course, since I'm all like totally ripped and stuff), and suddenly began to think it odd that, everything I seem to care about, everything that motivates me in life has nothing to do with my survival, or at least my practical needs. "It's all bullshit!" I thought, which I could say about almost anything. My desires and frustrations all based on nothing more then the way I feel when I do something, or the way it feels when I don't do something. How ridiculous is that?
Have you ever thought about the fact that out of the entire animal kingdom, we are the only species to have developed in such a way that we are driven and able to pursue our wants, instead of just our needs. In fact I'd go one step further and say that in general we are no longer concerned about our basic survival, and instead only chase after our emotional wants, in a desperate attempt to feel good; And that is the entire motivation for anything we do in modern society. Our goals, aspirations, behavior and thoughts, all governed by our intangible, irrational, cloudy feelings.
Our emotions (which, just for clarification, are in your brain, not your heart) likely developed during our more primitive stages as a survival mechanism. Fear, most probably being the origin of it all. Those who were fearful of predators could run away, and live to reproduce (all night long). Those who did not, well, they become stem cell research, or end up in the pasta sauce jar label as "meat flavor". Over time, emotional traits that helped us better survive our environment were selected for, and eventually would lead to other emotions (like anger, depression, and angry depression) all based on the original idea of fear, and vicariously, self preservation.
Over the last few centuries, human evolution and societal development has accelerated at a dramatic pace. Where once our basic survival (like the rest of the animal kingdom) was priority one in our minds, we are now in the fortunate state (some would say) where food is easily available (for most), and is rarely a concern. There are some that still live off the land, and grow and harvest their own food, but most of us take this for granted and are used to the notion of driving in our automatic carriages to a centrally located food housing building known colloquially as a market, supermarket or grocery store.
How do we view food now? How often do you think of food in terms of survival? I doubt it's much, if at all. Except, of course, each morning when you worry about where the herd of buffalo has migrated to in order to keep your family fed, or shout to the heavens that "Soilent Green is people!"
Like almost everything else, food has changed from a need to a want. I would wager that when you do think about food, you think about how delicious something will taste, and how it will make you feel when you eat it. The entire "purpose" of food tasting good to our taste buds (and really, our brains) is so that we have a drive to eat, and sustain ourselves. Now the feeling of eating something that tastes good has outweighed the original reason to eat, and becomes a pursuit of pleasure. Not a need. A want. An emotional want.
Likewise shelter. Another necessity to keep us pathetic beings protected, and out of the cold, heat, and pretty much everything else the other animals seem to have no problem with. Most of us never bother thinking of which tree(s) we should stay under, or which caves we can hide in for the night, as we have central heating, A/C, and comfy couches with LCD TVs. Houses are a commodity. You want one that reflects esoteric ideas like your "personality", or your "philosophy for living". Rarely do I hear people being pleased that they have four walls and a roof (unless those four walls and a roof reflect an artistic interpretation of the emptiness in modern society . . . maaaaannnnn). How does the house make you feel? Hmmm? How does it look? That's what's subjectively important to us emotionally-based humans. (Feel free to scoff here).
Food and shelter, two of the most important needs are taken care of for us these days, and also taken for granted, like any good interdependent man-made system. The air we breathe is, for now, free, so we can cross that one off the list. In today's society we've been lucky enough to do away with the basic survival mentally that was all our great great ancestors ever knew, and yet we still possess these irrational emotions that just kinda float around and react to random people and situations as if we were still in the wild.
Goals for the every man of today deal with self image, and personal pleasure, neither of which, at least by my estimates, are needs.
The same goes with our never ending quest for love and romance. What the hell is romance anyway? I'm sure you can follow the path by now. Love is the name we apply to the feeling of attraction and mutual attraction. Evolving biologically as a mechanism of incentive for people to stay together to raise their offspring (since our human babies are born week, helpless, and defenseless, unlike most other mammals). This trait was selected for over time, and the reward feeling intensified to the point that the feeling itself takes precedence over the biological function it is directly connected to. Why? It feels good! Love and sex feel good to us and so we put them above the basic needs they were developed to ensure, in this case reproduction (all night long).
In essence, we love the feeling of reproducing without reproducing so much that we directly inhibit our ability to reproduce, ironically, in order to gain more personal pleasure from the feel good sensation of faux-reproduction without actual reproduction. Take that 'natural process of biological evolution'! ZING!
Now here we are, living in a reality where every desire is controlled by our needy and insecure emotional psyche, where our basic survival needs are no longer a worry, where we've put "feel good" wants in place of our previous needs, which in turn makes the new "feel good" wants into pseudo-needs. Everything leads us to the goal of emotional satisfaction, and emotions become harder and harder to satisfy as they grow more complex over time.
Damn. No wonder we are such a grounded, rational, logical species.
Related Essays:
72 Degrees In The Head, All The Time
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Tags: emotion logic evolution biology social psychology philosophy natural+selection
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