“I’m only human” is a good excuse

Humans are not designed to perceive the world in a completely true and factual manner.  No, the better statement is that humans are designed in such a way that produces the best odds for us to pass on our genes to future generations.  The designer is Natural Selection, and its influence is so strong and yet so subtle that it’s nearly impossible to make decisions about the world without it tinting your perceptions.

The real “us” is simply our genetic profile and the thing we think is “us” (our body, our thoughts, our feelings, our consciousness) are just parts of a vehicle that our genetic profile uses.  (This whole idea definitely deserves its own post – stay tuned)

So no, as weird as it sounds, Natural Selection has not designed humans so that we perceive our environment in the truest sense possible.  Of course, our eyes and ears and noses and hands do a good job of informing us about the external factors that surround us – but they don’t do a perfect job.  And at a deeper level, the feelings we associate with the inputs given to “us” (again, who is “us”, really?) by our eyes and ears and noses and hands can at times be misleading and other times downright fatal. 

The culprit is a mismatch between our advanced society and our primitive minds.  Natural selection and evolutionary psychology are still influencing us as if we were cavemen fighting for our lives, living in small tribes, and foraging and hunting for whatever food we can find.  Because of this mismatch, we often must decipher if a feeling is “true” or “false”. 

What does it mean for a feeling to be “true” or “false”?

A “true” feeling is a feeling that accompanies one or more inputs that informs us of a fact about our environment that is objectively true, or a fact, and the basic reaction to that feeling is in alignment with both our primitive minds and our modern society.  For instance, if we are walking in the woods and a bear bursts through the foliage with the intent to kill, our feeling of fear and the triggering of the fight-or-flight response would be true.  There is real danger.  The act of running away would give us the best odds to produce a positive outcome of this event from the viewpoint of both of primitive minds and modern society.

A “false” feeling is a feeling that accompanies one or more inputs that causes a reaction that aligns with our primitive minds but not our modern society, meaning what we think the feeling is based off is false in our actual environment.  A good example in this scenario is the pleasure a donut provides when eaten.  It feels good to eat a donut.  The sugar releases dopamine in our brains and Natural Selection tells us that we need more of that kind of food: high calorie and highly palatable.  If we were a caveman, a donut would be great.  It would provide a quick burst of calories and sustain us until our next meal.  But in modern society, donuts, and any other type of food you can think of, are available in abundance.  It is not good to eat donut after donut, but Natural Selection makes it feel good.  Until of course we keel over dead at the age of 32 from a massive heart attack.  Thus, it is a false feeling.

Ok, so what’s the lesson to be learned here?

Well, for one, we can now point to the cause of this constant friction between primitive mind and modern society: Natural Selection.  By understanding what the underlying force is, we can begin to loosen its grip.  We are no longer fighting some vague sense of “self-discipline” or “corporate overlords trying to get us fat and complacent”.  Knowing your enemy is the first step in defeating your enemy.

This revelation also highlights that there is nothing wrong with “us”, per se, but rather there is simply a deficiency in our mind’s ability to adapt to the modern world.  Perhaps there is a case to be made that the difference between humans with a body weight in the ideal zone versus humans with a body weight in the obese zone is just a difference in their location on the evolutionary spectrum of the mind.  It makes sense that our minds are trying to catch up to modern society via Natural Selection and that through this process, some minds are further along than others.  Maybe humans with an ideal body weight have different feelings that arise when receiving the various inputs of highly caloric, highly palatable foods than those humans who are obese.  Perhaps the first group, the ideal weight group, experiences more feelings of aversion while the second group, the obese group, experiences more feelings of attraction.

And all this brings it back to the title of this post: “I’m only human” is a good excuse.  So, remember that whenever you cave to another donut or you flip off the guy who cut you off in traffic or succumbed to another hours-long bout of social media scrolling, don’t hate on yourself too much.  In fact, rejoice!  A hypothesis I have about our negative feelings we experience when our primitive minds do succumb to the pleasures and pains of modern society, we are communicating to Natural Selection that “No!  This isn’t right!  Eating donut after donut is bad, not good.”  And combine that with a billion other human voices, Natural Selection will listen.  So, in a way, our dissatisfaction we experience during times of failure may in fact be a nudge to Natural Selection to evolve our minds and push our species along a path better suited to our modern society.

I like this positive spin: my individual failures are wins for humanity.

Ok, ok, ok.  I know what you might be asking, and the answer is NO.  I am not saying that it is a good idea to heedlessly indulge your every hedonistic desire for the “sake of humanity”.  If we really stop and think about it, the better way to contribute to the advancement of humanity would be to recognize the false feelings and then act against them – that is, in a way that is aligned with modern society and not your primitive brain.  Recognition of the false feeling is a win, but recognition and informed subsequent action is an even bigger win.  Shoot for the bigger wins but don’t beat yourself up too much on the smaller wins.

You’re only human after all.