Civilized to Death

Progress & Civilization

• Belief in progress—the promise and premise of civilization—is melting away like a glacier. But what about antibiotics and airplanes, women’s rights, gay marriage? True enough. But upon closer inspection, many of the supposed gifts of civilization turn out to be little more than partial compensation for what we’ve already paid, or they cause as much trouble as they claim to solve.
• “the rise of civilization” falsely imply “that civilization is good, tribal hunter-gatherers are miserable, and history for the past 13,000 years has involved progress toward greater human happiness.” But Diamond doesn’t buy it, writing, “I do not assume that industrialized states are ‘better’ than hunter-gatherer tribes, or that the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for iron-based statehood represents ‘progress,’ or that it has led to an increase in human happiness.”
• Here’s the story we’ve all been told about who we are and where we came from: We are descended from prehistoric ancestors whose lives were a constant struggle against starvation, disease, predators, and each other. Only the strongest, cleverest, most anxious, and most ruthless survived to pass their genes into the future—and even these lucky ones lived only to the age of thirty-five or so. Then, about ten thousand years ago, some forgotten genius invented agriculture, and thus delivered our species from animal desperation into civilized abundance, leisure, sophistication, and plenitude. Despite occasional setbacks, things have been getting better ever since.
• It’s emotionally difficult to question progress, because we’re so invested in the belief that things are getting better. This tendency serves us well as a survival mechanism, and nobody wants to believe we’ve invited our children to a party that’s already well into the overflowing-ashtrays-and-spilled-drinks phase. But understandable as this optimism may be, we shouldn’t mistake it for rational thought.
• What if all our genuflecting before hope and progress is masking the reality of a situation that is, in fact, already dire and steadily getting worse? In his 132-page gut-punch, A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright explains that “hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope,” he continued (in 2004), “elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality.”
• In 1929, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud elucidated the conundrum of the civilized: “Men are beginning to perceive that all this newly won power over space and time, this conquest of the forces of nature, this fulfillment of age-old longings, has not increased the amount of pleasure they can obtain in life, has not made them feel any happier.”
• But the mere fact that we happen to be here doesn’t mean here is necessarily any better than worlds that have been trampled on and discarded en route. That this is the course that history happens to have taken doesn’t mean it is the best possible outcome.
• the archaeological record is “clear and unambiguous” in showing that “war developed, despots arose, violence proliferated, slavery flourished, and the social position of women deteriorated” after our species shifted from foraging to living in large-scale agricultural settlements. Civilization has not reduced the ravages of human violence. On the contrary, civilization is the source of most organized human violence.
• Ridley lays his cards on the table. “The vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been.” I don’t know how Ridley proposes to measure how entertained our ancestors were, but all of his triumphant claims are, as we’ll see, far more debatable than they appear.
• Ridley claims, “The availability of almost anything a person could want or need has been going rapidly upwards for 200 years and erratically upwards for 10,000 years before that. Years of lifespan, mouthfuls of clean water, lungfuls of clean air, hours of privacy, means of travelling faster than you can run, ways of communicating farther than you can shout.” And then he really hits his stride: “This generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light-years, nanometres, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles, and of course dollars than any that went before. They have more Velcro, vaccines, vitamins, shoes, singers, soap operas, mango slicers, sexual partners, tennis rackets, guided missiles and anything else they could even imagine needing.” Far be it from me to criticize a man’s passion for Velcro and mango slicers, but what? If we agree that quality of life is best measured in light-years, tennis rackets, and guided missiles, then yeah, I guess civilization takes the prize. But if you value community, personal autonomy, and a meaningful existence more than dollars, soap operas, and megahertz, you may come to a different conclusion. (And how anyone can argue with a straight face that the air and water are cleaner today than they were ten thousand years ago is beyond me.)
• For Freud, civilization is the result of pleasure denied or, at least, delayed and deflected.
• Without the influence of psychedelics, it’s hard to imagine the quantum advances in music, art, film, and science that marked the last few decades of the twentieth century.
• The thesis of this book is that the truest, most lasting forms of progress are often those that are built upon an understanding of the past.
• Most of the games played on the field of civilization are finite and zero-sum: There are clear rules; there are winners and losers; each game has a beginning, middle, and end. But the game of life is (or should be) infinite: Rules are made by players who are free to change them at any time; there are no winners and losers, just players; and most important, the goal of an infinite game is to keep playing. Think of the best parts of your life: your relationships, your creativity, your sexuality, your dreams, your adventures. The point is not to win, but to keep going. Winning is the death of the game.
• There are reports that methane that’s been frozen since long before the dawn of civilization is already melting and bubbling to the surface of the oceans and rising in unstoppable vapors from Arctic permafrost. A large and growing community of scientists, environmentalists, and philosophers argue that we’re already well into the terminal phase of civilization. Maybe right now is the moment of stunned, blinded silence after the lightning has flashed, but before the confirming thunder has clapped.

Human Nature & Society

• Our most urgent dreams may simply reflect the world as it was before we fell asleep.
• Dr. Jonas Salk, famous for having invented the polio vaccine, put it memorably: “It is necessary now not only to ‘know thyself,’ but also to ‘know thy species’ and to understand the ‘wisdom’ of nature, and especially living nature, if we are to understand and help man develop his own wisdom in a way that will lead to life of such quality as to make living a desirable and fulfilling experience.”
• For centuries, we’ve been misinformed about what kind of creature we were, are, and can be. The resulting confusion undermines our attempts to live “desirable and fulfilling” lives. Lies can be repeated so frequently that they become indistinguishable from the voices in our heads: Civilization is humankind’s greatest accomplishment. Progress is undeniable. You’re lucky to be alive here and now. Any doubt, despair, or disappointment you feel is your own fault. Get over it. Walk it off. Take a pill and stop complaining.
• It’s difficult to settle on one element that sets Homo sapiens sapiens apart from all other animals. The list of failed candidates is long and includes things like tool use, cultivation of other species for food, nonreproductive sexual behavior, eye contact during sex, female orgasm, organized group conflict, and transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. Here’s my pitch: We are the only species that lives in zoos of our own design. Each day, we create the world we and our descendants are going to inhabit. If we want that world to be more like the San Diego Zoo than the living tombs in Bukittinggi, we’ll need a clearer understanding of what human life was like before our ancestors first woke up in cages. We’ll need to know our species.
• Repeated behaviors become innate tendencies and what we might think of as biological/psychological “expectations” over millions of sunrises and sunsets, so it’s no wonder that pretty much every human being alive would be mesmerized by the dancing flames of a small fire.
• “The design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter. The experience it could tolerate was defined by the circumstances to which its antecedents had adapted.”
• Subsistence-level hunters aren’t necessarily more moral than other people; they just can’t get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny. —Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
• In large-scale “civilized” societies, however, we receive conflicting messages on what constitutes proper behavior: Collegial generosity is encouraged on playgrounds and in elementary schools—where you can’t eat your candy if you didn’t bring enough for everyone—but in business schools and boardrooms, take-no-prisoners competition, acquisition, and individual success tend to be celebrated. Our lives are largely defined by deeply felt conflicts between the reflexive generosity of our hunter-gatherer nature and the inducements to selfishness characteristic of civilization.
• We talk, and often think, as if we owned our spouses and children. My wife. My kid. Baby, you belong to me. In a hunter-gatherer band, anyone with such ideas would be seen as a frightening, dangerous, socially inept lunatic facing banishment, or worse.
• These fundamental components of human culture evolved along with the biology of our species. Just as our unusually short colon and dull teeth reflect the fact that our ancestors have been cooking their food for a million years or more, our brains reflect, recognize, and reward the social values of a species that survives as a community.
• When you wake up smelling smoke, “Don’t worry, go back to sleep” may be precisely what you most want to hear, but that doesn’t make it good advice. Psychologist Tali Sharot calls this blind faith in progress “optimism bias.”
• If you’ve set my house on fire, don’t expect me to be grateful when you show up later with a bucket of water.
• It isn’t hyperbole to say that agriculture extracted humans from the world and pitted us against it.
• In his own journals, he was even more complimentary: “They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest—without knowledge of what is evil—nor do they murder or steal… they love their neighbors as themselves and they have the sweetest talk in the world… always laughing.” A few pages on, in one of the most chilling pivots in recorded history, Columbus wrote: “They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
• Some of the Spaniards, seeking a way to keep their iron weapons from rusting in the jungle humidity, were said to have killed native people and boiled down their bodies for fat with which to grease their guns.
• One of Darwin’s greatest (and most controversial) gifts was to provide the scientific evidence that all human beings are equally evolved, in that we all come from common ancestors.
• I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. —Thomas Jefferson
• When cultural values celebrate individual autonomy, respectful sharing of resources, and mutually beneficial interdependence, the logical result is a society in which people are generally satisfied with their lives and not overly concerned with telling others how to live theirs.
• This insatiable hunger for human labor also helps explain why most major religions so insistently and violently oppose nonreproductive sexual behavior—a major source of human suffering in civilized societies. Despite these prohibitions, nonreproductive sex can practically be considered a defining human characteristic. We are one of a very few species that enthusiastically engage in sex in myriad ways that can’t possibly lead to pregnancy, but many religions impose draconian punishments for masturbation, sodomy, same-sex dalliances, or even enjoying sex with one’s marital partner a little too much or too often. Seen as a way of compelling rapid population growth in order to fuel the growth of civilized populations, this otherwise bizarre prohibition of nonreproductive sex begins to make sense. Humans are in effect being bred as a source of cheap, disposable labor, like horses, oxen, or camels.
• Despite these prohibitions, nonreproductive sex can practically be considered a defining human characteristic. We are one of a very few
• Man is an animal suspended in a web of significance that he himself has spun. —Max Weber
• Dawkins is hardly alone in his dismal view of life outside the protective embrace of civilization. While such sentiments have been repeated for millennia, they may have reached their crescendo when the nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer described the natural world as a “scene of tormented and agonized beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths.”
• And perhaps worst of all, many of us have been convinced that we carry the darkness within us, in our selfish genes. “It is simply human nature,” we’re told, “to rape and kill and enslave—and anyone who thinks otherwise is a foolish romantic.” This messaging not only offends our decency and dignity, it insults our intelligence. The depiction of human nature embedded in the NPP isn’t science; it’s a marketing campaign for the status quo. The politics of perpetual fear is corrosive to our well-being and our innate capacities for cooperation, community, and kindness. Fear of terrorists, fear of running out of money, fear of getting old, fear of strangers, fear of death, fear of sharks, fear of being hit by lightning, fear of fear itself. It keeps us quiet and complacent in our supposedly protective cages. We’re trapped in and by this distorting, demonizing view of human nature and the natural world, seen as the two faces of an enemy to be feared and conquered, rather than an ally to be honored and nourished. This pernicious nonsense has us divided against ourselves, each other, and the planet itself. We live under suspicion of our own and each other’s natural impulses, ashamed to be animals, participating in the accelerating destruction of a natural world we’ve been taught is out to tear us limb from limb or gnaw away from inside. This is, all hyperbole aside, the deepest species-level psychopathology imaginable.
• In his classic book Walden, Henry David Thoreau rebelled against the worship of “superior” men. Concerning the ancient Egyptian pharaohs, he wrote, “As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”
• “History,” wrote Alexander Herzen, “is the autobiography of a madman,” and in historical fact, most of the supposed “great men of history” were criminals on a rampage. We celebrate them because they “changed the world.” But where’s the evidence that they changed it for the better?
• There is no logically sound reason to believe that the present is the predetermined destiny of the past. That’s the twisted line of thinking used by those who proclaim, “I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done, because if I changed anything, I wouldn’t be me!”
• These ideas persisted in Darwin’s thinking throughout his life and were expressed perhaps most eloquently in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, published eleven years before his death, where he tells the story of a zookeeper he met: “Several years ago a keeper at the Zoological Gardens showed me some deep and scarcely healed wounds on the nape of his own neck, inflicted on him whilst kneeling on the floor, by a fierce baboon. The little American monkey who was a warm friend of this keeper, lived in the same compartment, and was dreadfully afraid of the great baboon. Nevertheless, as soon as he saw his friend in peril, he rushed to the rescue, and by screams and bites so distracted the baboon that the man was able to escape.” For Darwin, this cross-species selflessness was no aberration, but an expression of something fundamental in social species.
• Even in the group of altruists, there will almost certainly be a dissenting minority who refuse to make any sacrifice. If there is just one selfish rebel, prepared to exploit the altruism of the rest, then he, by definition, is more likely than they are to survive and have children. Each of these children will tend to inherit his selfish traits. After several generations of this natural selection, the “altruistic group” will be over-run by selfish individuals, and will be indistinguishable from the selfish group. This hypothetical scenario is foundational to the NPP and to the “rational self-interest” considered fundamental to capitalism. The mantra is repeated, virtually word for word, in any number of books and lectures.
• The term egalitarian does not mean that all members have the same amount of goods, food, prestige, or authority. Egalitarian societies are… those in which everyone has equal access to food, to the technology needed to acquire resources, and to the paths leading to prestige. The critical element of egalitarianism, then, is individual autonomy.… Egalitarianism is not simply the absence of hierarchy.… The maintenance of an egalitarian society requires effort.
• And walking away was always an option, as foragers live in what anthropologists call “fission-fusion” social groups. Chimps and bonobos share the same social dynamic, suggesting it extends millions of years into our past. Groups come together and split apart as circumstances dictate: availability of food, seasonal weather changes, social tensions, and so on.
• Anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, for example, summarizes the scholarship on hunter-gatherer behavior as reflecting an assumption of affluence rather than the presumed scarcity central to the NPP: “Just as we analyze, even predict, Westerners’ behaviour by presuming that they behave as if they did not have enough,” she writes, “so we can analyze, even predict, hunter-gatherers’ behaviour by presuming that they behave as if they had it made.”
• But what about well-documented evidence of human cruelty? What about war and concentration camps? In 1961, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram designed a study to investigate how people respond when authority figures command them to inflict pain on innocent strangers. Milgram reported that when told to do so, 65 percent of the study participants repeatedly administered what they believed to be increasingly painful electric shocks to a subject displaying obvious distress. One could view Milgram’s entire career as an attempt to understand and illuminate the depravities committed in the concentration camps of World War II. The first paragraph of his first published article contains a mention of the gas chambers. Coincident with his research first being published, Adolf Eichmann was on televised trial in Israel—the trial at which Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe what she saw unfolding. In her book Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments, Gina Perry explains, “Milgram stressed the connection between Nazi functionaries like Eichmann and the subjects in his lab. His findings appeared to demonstrate that ordinary people would inflict pain on someone else simply because someone in authority told them to.” Milgram’s research appeared to have demonstrated the validity of neo-Hobbesian assumptions about human nature, and his research is still cited today as evidence of a deeply Hobbesian human nature. Each of us is a nasty brute at heart, held in check only by civilization. Milgram proved it. But there’s a problem. “This zombie-like, slavish obedience that Milgram described wasn’t what he’d observed,” according to Perry, who went back and inspected the original research notes. She points out that the commonly cited figure of 65 percent of people who followed the experimenters’ orders and went to the maximum voltage on the shock machine was based on just one of twenty-four different variations of the study Milgram conducted, “each with a different script, actors and experimental set up.” And that single variation involved just twenty-six subjects. In total, more than seven hundred people participated in the experiments, and their obedience rates varied enormously. In some scenarios, none of the subjects obeyed commands to shock the victim. In fact, Perry found that, overall, most of the subjects had refused to inflict any pain at all—quite the opposite of what millions of Psych 101 students have been led to believe.
• As primatologist Frans de Waal put it, “There never was a point at which we became social: descended from highly social ancestors, the monkeys and apes, we have been group-living forever.”
• In accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama said, “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease—the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.” When I heard these antiquated, discredited ideas articulated by such an intelligent, educated man, I was reminded of Mark Twain, who wondered “whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” A third option would be that the world is being run by smart people who have been misinformed by generations of scholars who were promulgating nonsense.
• Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky witnessed a similar transition in a troop of baboons he was observing in Kenya. Contaminated meat from a nearby dump wiped out the most aggressive, high-ranking males in the troop—leaving less aggressive, lower-ranking males, who had no interest in harassing the females and young. Sapolsky feared these easygoing males would be powerless against the young males sure to infiltrate the troop in the next season. But upon his return to Kenya, he found new males in the troop who had adopted the easygoing approach rather than trying to overturn it. Clearly, there are serious problems with the primate origins of war theory.
• These distortions of how endemic lethal violence is in hunter-gatherer lives are not inconsequential. In fact, they form a necessary baseline for the central argument of Pinker’s book, which is that “violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” The archaeological evidence simply does not support this thesis.
• Ferguson goes into great detail showing the context Pinker has left out of his discussion, concluding that “the total archeological record of prehistoric populations… clearly demonstrates that war began sporadically out of warless condition, and can be seen, in varying trajectories in different areas, to develop over time as societies become larger, more sedentary, more complex, more bounded, more hierarchical.” Ferguson concludes, “We are not hard-wired for war. We learn it.”
• Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Human beings are adaptive creatures, but the fact that we can adapt to all kinds of horrible conditions doesn’t mean we should.
• Human beings are complex and there is great variation among us in proclivities and behavior. Culture plays a powerful role in deciding what we consider to be “natural.” What seems normal in one society can be considered inhuman in another: cannibalism, incest, infanticide, eating bunnies or puppies, and so on. Darwin noted how deeply our species can be shaped by cultural indoctrination, writing in The Descent of Man, “It is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, whilst the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.”
• Hans Kummer demonstrated that captive baboons are in fact far more aggressive than members of the same species living in the wild. Kummer found that females are nine times more aggressive, while captive males are more than seventeen times as aggressive, when living in cages. Recall your own rage when trapped behind distracted idiots texting in traffic or wedged between smelly, snoring strangers in economy class while someone’s demon spawn is kicking the back of your seat. Is your hostility an expression of human nature—or is it perhaps better understood as a minor facet of human nature magnified by the unnatural conditions you’re trapped in?
• Homo sapiens looks a lot like a species that has lost its way. The route leading to where we are only seems a path in retrospect. Looking back, it’s clear we’ve been lurching from one thing to another with little understanding of what we were doing or where it all was leading. We have reached a pass that provides amazing perspective and potential. But still we’re lost, with no fixed point from which to plot our course forward. If character is destiny, then perhaps our destiny can be found in a better understanding of our character.
• Is doesn’t imply ought—but nor does ought imply is. The fact that something exists in nature doesn’t mean it’s necessarily healthy or wonderful. The natural world is replete with lethal snakes, poisonous berries, and infectious microbes. Nature is no place for carelessness, ignorance, or delusions of immortality. But the naturalistic fallacy—the belief that what’s natural is always better—is only fallacious up to a point. While it’s true that what exists in nature is not necessarily healthful, it’s far more likely to comport with biological reality than something with no roots in the natural world. To deny the probability of an innate congruence of the natural is to adopt the naturalistic fallacy fallacy.
• As early as 1930, American business consultants openly, excitedly explained that “advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with the ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.”
• We are certainly capable of ignoring the subtle dictates of our evolved, time-tested nature, but we pay a high price for doing so. I can defy my body’s need to move in favor of sitting here writing this book, but my risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, stress-related mental illness, and other ills will increase as a result. We can deny our naturally gregarious sexual appetites, but those distorted energies will find expression in frustrations, resentments, and psychopathologies of various kinds. We can survive on five or six hours of sleep, but we’ll suffer reduced cognitive function, depressed immune response, and a host of other psychophysiological problems. So to those who proclaim our ability to override our evolved nature, I say, “Well, only up to a point.”
• In egalitarian societies in which sharing was the central organizing principle and private property was nonexistent, there would have been little reason for concern over paternity. The presumptive nuclear family is an artifact of civilization, where unwed mothers have for centuries been abandoned at best, shamed and even murdered at worst. When male-female relations were reframed in newly agricultural societies, the mutual respect and autonomy characteristic of foragers were replaced by something closer to a master-slave dynamic. This tragic and lasting collapse of human dignity was largely driven by a demand for paternity certainty among newly possessive males who now wanted to know who was going to inherit their accumulated wealth.
• The most overwhelming feeling is the incredible increase in libido and change in the way that I perceived women and the way I thought about sex. Before testosterone… I would see a woman on the subway, and I would think, she’s attractive. I’d like to meet her. What’s that book she’s reading? I could talk to her. This is what I would say. There would be a narrative. There would be this stream of language. It would be very verbal. [But] after testosterone, there was no narrative. There was no language whatsoever. It was just… aggressive, pornographic images, just one after another. It was like being in a pornographic movie house in my mind. And I couldn’t turn it off. I could not turn it off.
• Christianity is a religion centered upon a figure who was supposedly conceived asexually by a virgin mother. Sexual hang-ups, anyone? Mark Twain noted the striking antieroticism of Christianity as expressed in its bizarrely sexless heaven: “[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race… sexual intercourse! It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!”
• Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion.… Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle.… Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.
• Once human communities grew beyond the point where every individual had a direct relationship with everyone else, something fascinating and terrible happened: Other people became abstractions. Perhaps Joseph Stalin was thinking along these lines when he said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” When the number of human beings rises to the point where it’s no longer possible to picture the faces of those who are affected by our decisions, innate human compassion is often overwhelmed by other concerns.
• People who say the system works work for the system. —Russell Brand
• In any case, there is no wine in the world that could taste twice that good to me. Not for $40. Not for $4,000. Similarly, drinking twice as much certainly doesn’t double my enjoyment of the wine.
• “The human brain mispredicts the sources of its own satisfaction, and the reason is that we fail to understand how quickly we will adapt to both positive and negative events. People are consistently surprised by how quickly the abnormal becomes normal, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. When people say, ‘I could never get used to that,’ they are almost always wrong.” This process of quickly taking comforts for granted is known to psychologists as “hedonic adaptation,” and it undermines our struggle for happiness by leading us to misplace our energy in pursuit of initially novel states that quickly become normal—addiction, in other words.
• In addition to our species’ self-defeating tendency to quickly take for granted whatever improved conditions we encounter or create, we’re susceptible to external cues telling us where our baselines should be located. In a column called “Downsizing Supersize,” economics journalist James Surowiecki points to a study in which “researchers put a bowl of M&M’s on the concierge desk of an apartment building, with a scoop attached and a sign below that said ‘Eat Your Fill.’ On alternating days, the experimenters changed the size of the scoop—from a tablespoon to a quarter-cup scoop, which was four times as big.” If people were only eating what they wanted, the scoop size shouldn’t have mattered, but it did—a lot. Bigger scoop, more candy. Surowiecki’s conclusion: “Most of us don’t have a fixed idea of how much we want; instead, we look to outside cues—like the size of a package or cup—to instruct us.” And the cues, in American society especially, all point toward more.
• Itamar Simonson and Amos Tversky have studied “context-dependent preferences.” They showed that if you presented potential customers with a standard inexpensive camera and a more expensive one with more features, about half would go for each. But when an even more expensive third option was added to the mix most people now opted for the middle option. Suddenly, just by adding the possibility of extreme extravagance to the mix, what had previously seemed pricey to many buyers became the reasonable choice. From a cramped seat in coach, business class looks like the promised land. But from your business-class seat, you can hear the tinkling of champagne glasses in first class.
• With monkeys, as with humans, generosity comes together with an expectation of fairness. In experiments de Waal ran with Sarah Brosnan, monkeys got a slice of cucumber or a grape for doing a task. The monkeys were fine as long as they were getting the same “payment,” whether it was high (a grape) or low (a cucumber slice). But when the researchers introduced unequal pay into the experiment, things got tense. “The monkey receiving cucumber contentedly munches on her first slice, yet throws a tantrum after she notices that her companion is getting grapes,” reported de Waal.
• Mirror neurons are key to human compassion; they fire whether you are skiing down a mountain or watching someone else ski down a mountain. The mirror system is the part of the brain that allows us to get inside each other’s heads. What Obhi and his colleagues found helps explain why poor people give away a greater proportion of what they have than rich people do: powerlessness boosts the mirror system, but power dampens it. Dacher Keltner (the guy who studied assholes in BMWs blowing by old ladies waiting to cross the street) agrees: “Power diminishes all varieties of empathy.” Ultimately, diminished empathy is self-destructive. It leads to social isolation, which is strongly associated with sharply increased health risks, including stroke, heart disease, depression, and dementia.
• Tim Ferriss, a well-known Silicon Valley investor and author, has said he knows lots of successful entrepreneurs who use psychedelics regularly, if not religiously. In an interview with CNN Money, Ferriss said, “The billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis. [They’re] trying to be very disruptive and look at the problems in the world… and ask completely new questions.”
• When asked to define “reality,” the famous science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
• Science is certainly one of the strongest lights ever to illuminate the known universe. But the light of science can be shadowy and spectral. Those who insist that nothing exists beyond that which is scientifically demonstrable are like children who cover their eyes and imagine the world disappears because they cannot see it.
• When journalist Bill Moyers asked Isaac Asimov about the relationship between soaring population and “the dignity of the human species,” Asimov was unequivocal. “It will be completely destroyed,” he said. “The same way democracy cannot survive overpopulation, human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears.” It sometimes seems as if there is a limited quantity of quality of life in the world, and as global population continues to soar, there’s less to go around. With 100 million people on the planet, there’d be plenty of fresh water, fish, space, and energy for all. But the economies in which we’re currently trapped thrive on growth—even at the expense of human well-being. Endless growth is the ideology of conventional economics and the cancer cell.
• When civilization falls away, we catch a glimpse of human nature in the raw. When the authoritarian structures supposedly protecting us from our dark Hobbesian nature collapse into dust and chaos, more often than not, all heaven breaks loose.
• In A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit documents how human beings from various cultures respond to calamity—not by looting, but by lending a hand. After reviewing the sociological literature and hundreds of personal accounts from disaster survivors, she concluded that “the image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it.” Research accumulated over decades of studying how people behave in earthquakes, floods, and bombings shows that our behavior is the opposite of what the NPP tells us to expect.
• We clamor toward tribalism: anything that promises group identity, mutual protection, and even a faint echo of belonging. We are starving for what our ancestors ate every day of their lives.
• The point of life is the living of it. Keep playing, enjoy and prolong the experience. Maybe distant intelligences haven’t been sending out signals because they realized that where they are, where they’re from, is exactly where they want to be. There’s no place like home, Toto. This response to the Fermi Paradox may also explain why human beings lived remarkably similar lives for 99 percent of our time on this planet. Life was good. Plenty birdies. Plenty fishies. Plenty mongongo nuts. No need to “advance” or “progress” from where we were. We were happy being there then.
• Straight ahead lies Acceptance. What if we strategically bring hunter-gatherer thinking into our modern lives by, for example, replacing top-down corporate structures with peer progressive networks and horizontally organized collectives and building an infrastructure of nonpolluting locally generated energy? If Homo sapiens sapiens were to divert spending on weapons, redirecting resources into a global guaranteed basic income that incentivizes not having children, thus reducing global population intelligently and without coercion, we would be taking steps toward acceptance. Once we start down this road, every step would lead us closer to a future that recognizes, celebrates, honors, and replicates the origins and nature of our species. This is, as far as I can see, the only road home. How likely is it that we will choose this path? Not very. But it’s well within our capacities and budget to enact such programs, if sufficient shifts in consciousness demand it. If the notion of a step into the future being also a step into the past seems like a contradiction, consider that every winter day moves us both farther from and closer to the warmth of summer.

Wealth & Inequality

• The notion of ownership—something that had been limited to a favorite spear, necklace, or piece of clothing—now took on almost magical power. Men could now own not only land, but surplus food and seeds, sources of water, animals, and soon enough, other human beings.
• This state of affairs could not be permitted. Men had to be made poor enough that they’d be forced to join the desperate throngs in the mines, armies, and factories. A London police magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun articulated the widespread view that poverty was integral to the health of civilization: “Poverty… is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”
• And make no mistake, people are still being dragged into the market economy. Multinational corporations routinely expropriate land in poor countries (or “buy” it from corrupt politicians), force the local populations off the land (so they cannot grow or hunt their own food), and offer the “luckiest” among them jobs cutting down the forest, mining minerals, or harvesting fruit in exchange for slave wages often paid in company currency that can only be used to buy unhealthful, industrially produced food at inflated prices at a company-owned store. These victims of market incursion are then often celebrated as having been saved from “abject poverty.” With their gardens, animals, fishing, and hunting, they had been living on less than a dollar per day. Now, as slave laborers, they’re participating in the economy. This, we’re told, is progress.
• From foragers being forced off land they’ve lived on for centuries because they cannot produce deeds of ownership, to eighteenth-century Scottish Highlanders who preferred to tend their sheep, to today’s college graduates saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they’ve landed their first job, nonparticipation in the market economy has consistently and effectively been eliminated as a viable option. To those who suggest we should “Love it or leave it,” I’d suggest that neither option is—or has ever been—a realistic possibility.
• McDougall calls it the “Nike Effect,” but Nike is far from alone in following these steps to financial success. They just followed the process to spectacular wealth. We see the same process of replacing the cheap and natural with something worse in the “No Backyard Chickens, Industrialized Farming Effect,” the “Unnecessary Cesarean Delivery on Friday so Your Doctor Can Golf on Saturday Effect,” the “Growing Marijuana Is Illegal, Take These Toxic, Addictive, Expensive Pills Instead Effect,” or the “Breast-feeding Is Disgusting, Use Formula Effect.”
• The growing anxiety around parenting in the United States may also be tied to economic inequality. Fabrizio Zilibotti and Matthias Doepke are economists whose research on parenting is explained in their book Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids. They found that, compared to a generation or two ago, the amount of time parents spend supervising their kids has risen dramatically—especially in countries where economic inequality has also been increasing. As Zilibotti explains, “In a society that is very unequal—where there are lots of opportunities if one does well and very negative outcomes if one is less successful—parents will be more worried that their children won’t become high achievers in school. But if you go to a country where there is less inequality, parents may be less worried about that, not because they care less about their children, but because the negative outcomes aren’t as bad.” Other considerations, such as the children’s happiness and individuality, can be sacrificed to the frenzy to succeed.
• But how can we say a nation is “the most prosperous” in history when its infrastructure is collapsing, its mentally ill are condemned to prisons, millions are denied even basic medical care, one in five children go to bed hungry each night, and so on? What does “prosperity” mean in a country where 47 million people are below the official poverty line, and millions more hover just above it? It’s unconscionable to follow the common but absurd pattern of averaging the astronomical wealth of a few families into comforting, meaningless statistics and calling the United States “prosperous.”
• In 2012, according to research compiled by French economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues, the top 1 percent of households in the United States took 22.5 percent of total income, the highest proportion since 1928. In the 1950s, an American CEO could expect to be paid about twenty times more than a typical worker at his firm. Today, the ratio is more than ten times that—over two hundred to one. And some CEOs make that kind of ratio look downright Marxist. In 2011, Apple’s Tim Cook was paid $378 million in salary, stock, and other benefits—6,258 times the wage of the average employee at Apple. The richest eighty-five people in the world control more wealth than the poorest half of the planet’s population. Let that sink in for a moment. Eighty-five human beings who fart in bed just like you and me control more wealth than 3.5 billion other people—many of whom live in desperate poverty. Piketty, who is “arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality,” according to Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, has concluded that income inequality in the United States today is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.”
• But while Darwin believed economic inequality to be a necessary first step in the development of civilization, he knew that material inequality wasn’t present in many of the societies he’d visited in his travels, and that such inequality must, therefore, be something more complicated than a straightforward expression of human nature.
• A few years later, he articulated his thesis in more detail in a book called Stone Age Economics, in which he wrote, “The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty,” Sahlins declared, “is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”
• And I’m certainly not forgetting the brutal fact that while billions of people scavenge for their next meal or some clean water, a few live in hilltop mansions pouring last night’s flat champagne down the drain. But the accelerating processes by which our species is transforming this planet from the wonder of wonders to “an immense pile of filth,” in Pope Francis’s words, benefit the super-wealthy only in limited ways, and only for a while. It’s true that they’ll never have to worry about starving, finding a job, or raising a family in the back seat of their Lamborghini, but they can’t buy their way out of the storms we all face. Rising seas don’t distinguish mansions from shacks. The wealthy and their children breathe the same fouled air, bathe in the same toxic water, and eat food steeped in the same poisons and cruelty. A stressed-out millionaire may get the best chemotherapy money can buy, but he’s still going to get the cancer. The rich are ultimately subject to the same rules of nature as everyone else.
• Money is like food, rain, wives, husbands, kids, cats, sex, TV stations, and decorative pillows in that more than enough is too much. But because we’re so indoctrinated to believe that money is the golden exception to the rule of diminishing returns, it’s very difficult to know when to stop striving for more, to take the money and run.
• Who among us has the good sense to drop the mango and walk away? I know, you think you’d buy a cozy cottage and chillax if you had a million dollars in the bank, but would you really? Once you had that million, you’d no longer be the person you are today. You’d have a different group of friends—many of whom had a lot more than a million dollars tucked away. Your “normal” would have shifted to something a lot more expensive to maintain. The cues in your environment telling you what “normal” means would be sending new, more expensive signals.
• The Spanish word aislar means both “to insulate” and “to isolate,” which is what most of us do when we get more money. We buy a car so we can stop taking the bus. We move out of the apartment with all those noisy neighbors into a house behind a wall. We stay in expensive, quiet hotels rather than the funky guesthouses we used to frequent. We use money to insulate ourselves from the risk, noise, inconvenience. But the insulation comes at the price of isolation. Our comfort requires that we cut ourselves off from chance encounters, new music, unfamiliar laughter, fresh air, and random interaction with strangers.
• In New York, I’d developed psychological defenses against the desperation I saw on the streets. I told myself that there were social services for homeless people, that they would just use my money to buy drugs or booze, that they’d probably brought their situation on themselves. But none of that worked with these Indian kids. There were no shelters waiting to receive them. I saw them sleeping on the streets at night, huddled together for warmth, like puppies. They weren’t going to spend my money unwisely. They weren’t even asking for money. They were just staring at my food like the starving creatures they were. And their emaciated bodies were brutally clear proof that they weren’t faking their hunger. A few times, I bought a dozen samosas and handed them out, but the food was gone in an instant, and I was left with an even bigger crowd of kids (and, often, adults) surrounding me with their hands out, touching me, seeking my eyes, pleading. I knew the numbers. With what I’d spent on my one-way ticket from New York to New Delhi, I could have pulled a few families out of the debt that would hold them down for generations. With what I’d spent in New York restaurants the year before, I could have put a few of those kids through school. Hell, with what I’d budgeted for a year of traveling in Asia, I probably could have built a school. I wish I could tell you I did some of that, but I didn’t. Instead, I developed the psychological scar tissue necessary to ignore the situation. I learned to stop thinking about things I could have done but knew I wouldn’t.
• Calling the miserable rich “winners” is like calling everyone who ever wore a military uniform a “hero.” We’re reinforcing the false narrative that generated the mess in the first place.
• A wealthy friend of mine recently told me, “You get successful by saying ‘yes,’ but you need to say ‘no’ a lot to stay successful.” If you’re perceived to be wealthier than those around you, you’ll have to say “no” a lot. You’ll be constantly approached with requests, offers, pitches, and pleas—whether you’re in a Starbucks in Silicon Valley or the back streets of Calcutta. Refusing sincere requests for help doesn’t come naturally to our species.
• Wealthy subjects were more likely to lie in negotiations and excuse unethical behavior at work, such as lying to clients in order to make more money.
• Books such as Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work and The Psychopath Test argue that many traits characteristic of psychopaths are celebrated in business: ruthlessness, a convenient absence of social conscience, a single-minded focus on “success.” But while psychopaths may be ideally suited to some of the most lucrative professions, I’m arguing something different here. It’s not just that heartless people are more likely to become rich. I’m saying that being rich tends to corrode whatever heart you’ve got left.
• Medicare will pay for expensive surgery to keep an ill ninety-year-old alive for a few more painful months, but refuses to pay for much cheaper home care that could keep the same person out of medical institutions. “You can’t believe the forces of the system that are arrayed against [being allowed to die at home],”
• She found that Medicare won’t pay doctors for the time it takes to offer sound advice, but it will pay for expensive drugs and devices: “The corporate healthcare lobbies help determine what doctors get paid to do. We pay doctors very well for deploying technology and very poorly for spending time with patients. This shapes their behavior.” One would think that a country with chronic budget deficits and a huge segment of the population about to enter their final years would enthusiastically encourage conversations about redirecting medical spending in ways that both increase quality of life and reduce costs. But so far, at least, that’s not happening.
• More is no better than enough.

Death & Mortality

• Richard Dawkins is one of the most famous scientists alive, and he is an enthusiastic teller of one of the darkest stories ever told. In River Out of Eden, Dawkins describes animal life as an operatic ordeal of starvation, misery, and pitiless indifference. “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation,” he writes with trembling hand. “During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease.”
• And as for what comes next, what’s to fear from that? As Mark Twain put it, “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
• Every seal I’ve encountered was either snoozing on a warm rock or frolicking in the water with other seals. They looked happy, fit, and relaxed to me. Skeptical that a seal’s lot in nature could be as bad as that slow-motion terror porn implied, I ran some numbers. It turns out that harbor seals live about thirty years. The gory death on that nature special took a few seconds in real time. So the ratio breaks down to roughly thirty years of hanging out with friends, eating fresh fish, and soaking up the sun followed by a sudden, unanticipated, nearly painless demise. Even if that particular seal died in her prime—at fifteen or twenty years of age—the ratio of pleasure to pain in her life was better than what most of us can expect. Along with its indifference and occasional cruelty, nature has surprisingly compassionate qualities as well.
• In an interview with NBC Nightly News, for example, a biophysicist from UCSF explained, “It wasn’t until two or three hundred years ago that we lived past age forty-five, so our spines really haven’t evolved to the point where they can maintain this upright posture with these large gravity loads for the duration of our lives.” Or consider this cascade of confusion from Discover magazine: “For the last century and a half, the average life span in wealthy countries has increased steadily, climbing from about 45 to more than 80 years. There is no good reason to think this increase will suddenly stop.” Hold on. There is every reason to think that it will level off. As we run out of babies to save, infant mortality will stop declining, and this statistical sleight-of-hand will be revealed as the party trick it is. Misinformation about what’s really been happening with average human life span has generated a slew of false clinical conclusions about how and when to treat patients, what sorts of preventive measures can and should be taken, and where to look for the true causes of poor health.
• According to Chinese government records, about thirty-five thousand abortions are performed in that country every day. In China and India particularly, but not exclusively, healthy female fetuses are traditionally aborted because boys are preferred. My intention is not to debate the ethics of abortion, but to highlight the mathematical absurdity of including infant deaths in calculations of prehistoric life expectancy while excluding the many millions of abortions performed each year in estimations of contemporary life expectancy. There’s nothing funny about dying babies, but the exploding global population resulting from increased fertility, reduction in infant mortality, and religious resistance to birth control are no joke, either. Comparing high infant mortality (but low population growth and high quality of life) among foragers with the lower infant mortality rates of modern humans (but resulting exponential population growth and suffering of billions of impoverished people) can lead to difficult conclusions.
• Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. —James Baldwin
• In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker wrote, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”
• When the game is over, it’s over, and the lights go out. This—whatever it is—will be no more. Fearing death is literally being afraid of nothing at all. Yet civilization amplifies and is fueled by our fear of death, when it’s the dying we should really be concerned with.
• Only a handful of states allow doctor-assisted euthanasia, and even there, the regulations are onerous. If we don’t own our lives, what, then, is ours?
• Researchers have found that psilocybin is so effective in alleviating the existential fears of the dying that just a single dose produces immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression in people suffering from terminal cancer. The psychological benefits were undiminished even six months later in patients who survived that long. One of the scientists involved in this research was so amazed by the results that he questioned whether they could be real. “I thought the first ten or twenty people… must be faking it.… People who had been palpably scared of death—they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”

Modern Life Pathologies

• Call me ungrateful. I’ve got silver fillings in my teeth, artisanal beer in my fridge, and a world of music in my pocket. I drive a Japanese car with cruise control, power steering, and air bags poised to cushion me in an explosive embrace should I drift off. I wear German glasses that darken in California sunlight, and I’m writing these words on a computer that’s thinner and lighter than the book they’ll eventually be printed in. I enjoy the company of friends I’d have lost if they hadn’t been saved by emergency surgery, and, for the last seventeen years of his life, my father’s blood was filtered through the liver of a man named Chuck Zoerner, who died in 2002. I have every reason to appreciate the many wonders of civilization. And yet.
• Each successive year is the hottest on record, and the next undeclared war ignites from the embers of the previous while political parties nominate charlatans who can’t agree on what’s happening, much less what to do about it. Despite the marvels of our age—or maybe partly because of them—these are deeply troubled times.
• “We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring a proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse.”
• The clear implication is that any discontent or despair you may be experiencing must be due to some fault of your own—certainly not to the civilization you were born into. You aren’t working hard enough, consuming the right products, taking the right supplements, following the right exercise regimen, driving the right car, or drinking enough water.
• If it’s making us unhealthy, unhappy, overworked, humiliated, and frightened, what’s all this progress really worth? We know more or less what it costs: nearly everything.
• Really? Don’t we all know why Brian Stevenson held on? Once his feet were off the ground, he was caught in a loss aversion loop from which the last chance to escape was always already gone. The transition from lending a hand, to holding on for dear life, to the soaring realization that the holding on may have been a fatal mistake probably took no more than a few seconds, but I’d bet that every one of those seconds Stevenson was thinking: “I should’ve let go before. It’s too late now.” Haven’t we all been caught in such traps? Who hasn’t been in a situation that seemed to make sense at the time, but that ultimately made no sense at all? Who hasn’t been mired in a toxic relationship with someone we love too much to leave right now, tonight? Or stuck in a job that scorches the soul but that we can’t afford to quit, so we buy expensive toys to mask the pain, thereby making the job even harder to quit?
• Our species went from living in the world to living in a zoo of our own making.
• “In theory, theory and reality are the same. But in reality, they are very different.”
• Misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the data on human longevity have caused generations of physicians and researchers to ignore overwhelming evidence that modern inactivity, stress levels, diets, and so on are pathogenic (disease causing).
• The modern world is the ultimate human zoo, designed, created, administrated, and occupied by humans. Tragically, the zoo we’ve designed for ourselves is a poor reflection of the world in which our species evolved, and is thus a profoundly unhealthy, unhappy place for too many of the human animals it contains. Human beings are capable of surviving in violent, confined contexts, but, like water, we grow stagnant and putrid when we cease to flow.
• Civilization may be the greatest bait-and-switch that ever was. It convinces us to destroy what is free so an overpriced, inferior copy can be sold to us later—often financed with the money we’ve earned hastening the destruction of the free version. Contaminate streams, rivers, lakes, and aquifers with industrial waste, pesticide runoff, and fracking chemicals, and then sell us “pure spring water” (often just tap water) in plastic bottles that break down into microplastics that find their way to oceans, whales’ stomachs, and our own bloodstreams. Work hard now so you can afford to relax later. We ignore friends and family while we struggle to get rich so someone will eventually love us. The voices of civilization fill us with manufactured yearnings and then sell us prepackaged dollops of transitory satisfaction that evaporate on the tongue.
• Bruce Alexander, a Canadian psychologist, decided to look more closely at these studies. Alexander and his colleagues ran a series of experiments centered on identical rats living in two different settings: One group lived in typical laboratory cages while the other group lived in a setting meant to replicate normal rat life as much as possible. The so-called Rat Park was two hundred times bigger than the cages, contained sixteen to twenty rats of both sexes, and plenty of food and toys. What Alexander and his colleagues discovered calls into question every behavioral study ever conducted on caged rats: The rats that were trapped alone in cages opted to get high as much as possible, but the rats with interesting lives (community, space, toys) tried the drugged water once or twice, and then stayed away from it. The rats with lives worth living had little interest in the escapism the drugs offered. Overall, they consumed less than a quarter of the drugged water the isolated rats did. None overdosed or ignored food until they starved. These studies strongly suggest that addiction may have more to do with traumatic experiences and environment than with the magical qualities of substances.
• In 1970, it took eight hours to fly from New York to London. It still does, but now the seats are smaller.
• In Born to Run, his 2009 bestseller, Christopher McDougall explains how Nike convinced generations of joggers to ignore the evolved biomechanics of the human body to run in an unnatural, debilitating way that required the purchase of their expensive, utterly unnecessary products. Great for Nike’s bottom line, but this departure from human biomechanics resulted in tens of thousands of injuries and incalculable costs to human health. McDougall quotes a financial columnist who thought Nike’s plan was “brilliant.” “[They] created a market for a product and then created the product itself. It’s genius, the kind of stuff they study in business schools.”
• While some of these reductions in risk to kids are probably due to increased parental vigilance, there’s little doubt that while parents are in a frenzy trying to protect their children, they may be distracted from far more potent threats such as lack of exercise, unhealthy diet, chronic stress, too little face-to-face interaction with friends, and lack of free time and access to nature—all of which are taking a horrible toll on children.
• Given the unrealistic expectations placed upon both parents and children, and the American tendency to see misalignments between our evolved nature and our current society as pathologies that can be addressed with pharmaceuticals, it shouldn’t be surprising that we’re drugging kids into lethargic submission. By high school, nearly one in five boys in the United States will have been diagnosed with ADHD—a “disease” that strikingly resembles normal juvenile primate behavior: a need for plentiful physical activity, skepticism of authority figures, an insatiable hunger to play. In 1997, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that around 3 percent of American schoolchildren had been diagnosed with ADHD. By 2013, the percentage had exploded to 11 percent, and an astonishing 15.1 percent for boys. And of those who’ve received the diagnosis, two-thirds are being given prescription drugs.
• And yet, sales of ADHD drugs increased by 89 percent between 2008 and 2016, rising from $5.5 billion to an estimated $12 billion to $14 billion. We seem to have decided that it’s too expensive or inconvenient to modify the environments our children learn in, so we’re modifying their brain chemistry instead. The suspicion that a lot of kids are being drugged just for being kids is supported by a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal showing that boys born in December (thus, typically the youngest boys in their class) “were 30 percent more likely to receive a diagnosis of ADHD than boys born in January,” and these boys were 40 percent more likely to be given a prescription for meds. Their “sickness” appears to boil down to having been born in December instead of January.
• But increasingly, even the smallest children’s lives are being oriented away from play and toward work. Daphna Bassok, a researcher specializing in educational policy, found that in 1998, 30 percent of American teachers believed that children should learn to read while in kindergarten. By 2010, that figure had almost tripled, to 80 percent. The absence of time to just hang out and play together is having serious consequences in how kids develop. “They can do math in first grade, but they are not attuned to subtle social cues,” says Dr. Ellen Littman, a clinical psychologist and coauthor of Understanding Girls with ADHD. “They are not developing the normal skills that come from interacting with play, including how to manage their emotions.” Peter Gray agrees.
• Another reason I was angry, to be honest, is that my burgeoning sexual awareness had become a source of frustration, shame, and confusion. As the hormonal surge swept through me, the possibility of exploring this new world with a girl or woman became increasingly urgent and unlikely. There was something deeply unjust about needing something so badly (sex? love? intimacy? touch?) while the practical conditions of life made the chances of finding it just about zero. We laugh at the sexual frustrations of testosterone-addled, pimply-faced, braces-wearing geeks in movies—because, well, they’re in a laughable situation. But their suffering is real, and the intense frustration and humiliation experienced by young people who feel they’re being denied something they need at the core of their being generates a dangerous pressure.
• In his semiautobiographical novel, The House of the Dead, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, “If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment… all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.” But from factory floor to corporate boardroom, useless, meaningless work is standard-issue in our world. And you’re expected to be grateful to have it!
• In any case, prosperity isn’t the key to life satisfaction. Italian economist Paolo Verme found the variable “freedom and control” to be the most significant predictor of self-reported quality of life, by far. The kind of freedom that leads most directly to happiness, in other words, is the freedom not to get up to the ringing of an alarm five days a week, not to be obligated to shave and put on a tie (or bra) if you don’t feel like it, not to pretend to respect someone you don’t just because he’s your “boss” just so you’ll have enough money to keep the bill collectors at bay for another month.
• The quality of most things has an upper limit, which is normally reached rather quickly. If not, what you’re seeking probably has less to do with the product in question than with some psychological itch you’ve been convinced that product can scratch. A watch tells the time; a $20,000 Rolex tells people you’ve got issues.
• Francis Crick, the discoverer of the DNA double helix, was a day-tripper, the Beatles went from playing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in monkey suits to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and Steve Jobs recalled his experiences with LSD as “one of the two or three most important things I ever did in my life.”

Ancient vs Modern Living

• How would a time traveler from the prehistoric past assess the state and trajectory of the modern world? She would no doubt be impressed by much of what she encountered here, but once her amazement at mobile phones, air travel, and self-driving cars subsided, what would she make of the substance and meaning of our lives? Would she be more awed by our doodads or dismayed by what we’ve left behind in our rush toward an increasingly precarious future? This question isn’t as hypothetical as it seems. Missionaries, explorers, adventurers, and anthropologists have been consistently confused and disappointed by indigenous people’s rejection of the comforts and constraints of civilization.
• If you, like Keynes, were hoping for an egalitarian world of shared plenitude and lots of free time to enjoy the company of those you love, consider that our ancestors occupied a world very much like that until the advent of agriculture and what came to be called “civilization” sprouted about ten thousand years ago, and we’ve been progressing away from it ever since.
• We’ve lost too much of the knowledge and physical conditioning necessary to live comfortably under the stars. If our ancestors were wolves or coyotes, most of us are closer to pugs or poodles.
• Most of the daily activities of contemporary foragers from the Australian desert to the Arctic Circle have remained remarkably consistent since preagricultural times, including how they hunt, gather, prepare food, build their shelters, make collective decisions, resolve conflict, educate their children, and so on.
• Until the radical transformations triggered by agriculture around ten thousand years ago, human lives were characterized by egalitarianism, mobility, obligatory sharing of minimal property, open access to the necessities of life, and a sense of gratitude toward an environment that provided what was needed.
• Scientists analyzing remains from modern-day Sudan found that less than 1 percent of the hunter-gatherers living in the area suffered from tooth decay. Once they adopted agriculture, the rate shot up to around 20 percent. Most of the dangers civilization claims to protect us from are, in fact, created or amplified by civilization itself.
• Jared Diamond’s 1999 essay about the transition to agriculture is called, ominously, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” More recently, historian Yuval Noah Harari goes so far as to call the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud.” In his 2015 bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he writes, “The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.”
• We’ll never know for certain what inspired those last generations of foragers to build Göbekli Tepe, but their descendants appear to have had serious regrets.
• Rather than doubling every generation, as Malthus supposed, archaeologists have shown that until the advent of agriculture, human population doubled roughly every quarter million years—not every twenty-five. Not once a generation, that is, but once every ten thousand generations.
• Artifacts show very little advancement in the design of spear points or arrowheads, burial rites, ornamentation, and so on. Why were they stuck for so long? I’d suggest that they weren’t stuck at all; they were home. If necessity is the mother of invention, why is it so hard for us to surmise that they were happy and comfortable—without any apparent need for “progress”? In our world, where the present is habitually dismissed as a staging area to a better future, and disinformation concerning the long prehistory of our species is ubiquitous, it’s hard to acknowledge that our ancestors’ lives weren’t solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, or short. It’s nearly impossible for us to conceive that they could have been happy to stay right where they were. But this is what the evidence suggests.

Technology & Future

• As futurist Kevin Kelly puts it, “Running a system is the quickest, shortest, and only sure method to discern emergent structures latent in it. There are no shortcuts to actually ‘expressing’ a convoluted, nonlinear equation to discover what it does. Too much of its behavior is packed away.… The most unexpected things will brew in this bionic hivelike supermind.”
• It’s hardly surprising that we’d seek future guidance in our past. How our species lived in the wild tells us how best to design our modern zoo. We may be on the cusp of a future unimaginable even a few decades ago, a future in which our species slips many of the constraints that have shaped human history since Göbekli Tepe was buried in trash.
• Given the statistically overwhelming odds that life has emerged many, many times, and that advanced intelligence and technology appear to evolve naturally once life appears, why have we seen no evidence of anybody else? Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others have expressed their concern that the silence signifies a “great filter” inherent in technological development. They believe there may be a self-destruct trigger inherent in technology that has destroyed every advanced life-form before it could send out the transmissions so glaringly absent from the sky. Either they blew themselves up, poisoned themselves, or were overtaken by ruthless artificial intelligence. Looking around at our current mess—much of which is obviously due to our inability to control the gadgetry and systems we’ve created—none of these dark possibilities seems particularly far-fetched.
• On the other side lie Bargaining and Depression: more of what got us here. We’ll keep coming up with temporary fixes for the most immediate threats, and keep ignoring long-term trends as we have since our ancestors took their first steps out of the Garden onto the farm. As the destruction of the natural environment of this planet continues, we will evolve ever further from our organic origins, our fragile meat-bodies “upgraded” piece by piece with technological adaptations to a world increasingly toxic to living things. Today’s titanium knees and hips will become tomorrow’s implanted memory chips and subcutaneous GPS locators. The continued suffering of our animal souls will be increasingly numbed and medicated as the process proceeds to its inevitable conclusion. Tearful eyes will be replaced by unblinking electronic photodetectors that “see” far beyond the biological human visual spectrum, transmitting what they see to the all-knowing, all-seeing Orwellian swarm into which our descendants are absorbed so completely that individual human beings exist only in theory and prohibited memory. Again, we seem already to have taken steps far down this path.Community & Connection
• When you’re living with just enough, as all foragers do by definition, your only insurance policy is the generosity of the people around you. You pay into that policy by being a reliable source of assistance yourself. In this context, it’s no surprise that psychologists have established that one of the best ways to improve your sense of well-being is by helping others.
• No wonder author Christopher Benfey, in his survey of utopian communities around the world, found that even when separated by time, nationality, and religious orientation, they almost always share a few basic foundational ideas: “that society should be based on cooperation rather than competition; that the nuclear family should be subsumed into the larger community; that property should be held in common; that women should not be subordinate to men; that work of even the most menial kind must be accorded a certain dignity.”
• Researchers have concluded again and again that the single most reliable predictor of happiness is feeling embedded in a community. In the 1920s, around 5 percent of Americans lived alone. Today, more than a quarter do—the highest levels ever, according to the Census Bureau. Meanwhile, the use of antidepressants has increased over 400 percent in just the past twenty years and abuse of pain medication is a growing epidemic.
• We live in a world created by and for institutions that thrive on commerce, not human beings that thrive on community, laughter, and leisure.