The Mugwumpery

Posting this sems a waste of space and your attention, since it seems so obvious to me. But I guess it’s not.

A friend: “Something is odd about the fact that we can be so incredibly wealthy today, in a real-world sense of the power at our fingertips, and yet be so unsatisfied.“

This is the central paradox of modernity. It has gradually been affecting more and more people since the Industrial Revolution.

I think the answer is simply that we humans evolved for a very different environment than the one we (initially a few elites, now almost everyone) live in.

We evolved for a world of scarcity, disease, and physical danger. A struggle to get enough calories to survive. In small tribes of 50 to 200 people, all of whom we knew personally.

Today we live in a society of billions, almost all strangers. The world is safe and calories are plentiful.

The things that made us happy and satisfied in our ancestral environment make us sick, depressed, and anxious today. Communication technologies make us compare ourselves with 1-in-100-million celebrities. Cheap calories make us suffer from obesity. We envy more successful strangers (there seems to be little envy of more-successful people we know personally), have impossibly high standards for mating and social status, etc.

Some people want to “go back to nature” to fix this. If we did it, the Earth could support less than 1% of the people alive today, and we’d lose most of our beloved technologies and comforts. The amount of art, literature, science, and new ideas would be reduced by 99+%.

So I think instead we need to change people – change our genes – to make us more compatible with the modern world.