After thousands of years of technological advancement with generations of people all working to “make the world a better place” and contributing “for the good of society” to make our life better, how is it that in America we work about twice as much as hunter gatherers, have rising suicide rates, less friends, and worse mental and cardiovascular health?
This seems to suggest that, despite generations of people contributing to the good of society, we may be moving backwards in terms of some of the things that really matter most to the individual. This seems paradoxical—aren’t we supposed to be improving our physical and mental health?
To get a handle on the situation of the well being of the individual in the US, Lets begin with some statistics:
The Situation in the United States
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[4] “Surging death rates from suicide, drug overdoses and alcoholism … are largely responsible for a consecutive three year decline of life expectancy in the U.S.”
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[5] “The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than [before humans came along].”
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[6] “The obesity rate has steadily increased since 1960–1962, where approximately 13% of American adults were obese. By 2014, figures from the CDC found that more than one-third (crude estimate 36.5%) of U.S. adults”
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[8] The average hunter gatherer works & exercises for ~25 hours a week. The average American works / sits for ~40 hours a week (not counting exercise)
This is a little strange considering that we’ve had ~12,000 years since the dawn of agriculture and society to build a societal utopia. In some limited areas we’ve succeed, but in many others—as shown above—we’ve fallen short.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes opined that by 2030, people would work only 15 hours per week. Well, we’re getting up to 2030 and we’re not close to working 15 hours a week. The average American doesn’t don’t even work less than hunter gatherers—so why is this?
Let’s shift gears to psychology. What is it that we’re fundamentally trying to get with so much work? Why are we working in the first place? What is it that we are all collectively working towards as a society? If we’re working about twice as much as hunter gatherers do … then what exactly are we working so hard for exactly?
Lets shift gears to exploring what we fundamentally want in order to try to provide a basis to answer these questions.
Human Psychology & What we Really Want
I’m going to posit that fundamentally, the only thing we really want are feelings.
We want to feel loved, appreciated. We want to feel included and heard. We want to feel like we’re doing something to make the world a better place and have a sense of efficacy. We want to feel healthy, and we want the option for our minds to be tranquil. We want to feel full, and we want to have the ability to be at peace when we want to.
These desired feelings—along with much more—are evolutionarily developed in order to enhance our survival. These are hardwired into us and are the thing we fundamentally want. All of our efforts and the efforts of society should be efficiently geared towards these ends. Fundamentally, the reason why we do any action is because we believe it to satisfy one of our emotional needs or wants. By extension, the reason why we work is to try to give others the feelings they crave by producing things or providing services that are conducive to these emotions. At the deepest and most human level, this is the case.
But how do we satisfy our evolutionary feelings in our modern industrialized and digitizing world?
How we satisfy our evolutionary needs in a modern world
Advertising:
For the most part, the role of advertising is to confuse us. Very few advertisements you see actually advertise just the product and it’s features. Almost every advertisement you see is really suggesting that if you buy their physical product, then you will get what money simply can’t buy. Here’s an example you’ve probably seen recently—I’m convinced that advertisers identify psychological and emotional deficits in the population and then build their advertising campaigns off of that (even though that won’t actually address the root cause). Advertising conflates our human needs with the needs of business growth. Of course, the things we truly want are human needs. They evolved in a time where money did not affect our nature.
Possessions and Consumer Goods
Sadly, we’re tricked into buying this thing we do not need, and we bear all of the costs that extend beyond the price tag for this object—we have to bear the cost of storing it, maintaining it, fixing it, and then throwing it away (or giving it away as a “gift”).
Our possessions shackle us to the physical location that we store them. The more possessions we own, the more our possessions end up owning us. Something always needs to be fixed and we have to spend the time to fix it. The more we expand the size of our house and it’s charm, the more we become prisoners of own opulence. Entertainment paralyzes us. It’s not the physical goods we want, but the emotions that were advertised to come with it.
In the long run, most of the time we walk away with a net loss. We bought it hoping it could make us happier, more fulfilled, or have more social connections. But it didn’t. It was a false promise to begin with. This type of emotional bait and switching with a product contributes to that pervasive feeling of disappointed emptiness in our society. They can feel it—but they can’t quite put their finger on where it comes from. This is one source of it. We did not evolve to live in this modern world. We’ve created our own artificial environment completely different from the one we evolved in.
Self expression through possessions:
Advertising suggests that you are what you own. To an overbearing extent, the concept of self expression has been commandeered and commercialized to instill subtle emotional distress at a global scale.
After all, self expression fundamentally states that one can accurately judge a person’s internal qualities and personality simply from the clothes they wear. This culturally entrenched, misfounded, and emotionally pernicious idea has so many problems it deserves an entire analysis in itself. The quality of what a person wears does not in any way tell you about the quality of that person’s character, to say the very least.
Work
For our purposes, the US is characterized by increasing secularization, a deafening emphasis on career, and a lack of close human connections due to increased mobility. In the US, the maxim is that if it makes money it’s good. Work makes money, so culturally we believe in it. What a culture measures is what it does best.
What should I major in and what job should I get? In the US, the answer is resoundingly this: the one that makes the most money! In the wake of religion, money becomes our new god. As a culture, we ignore the fact that after 75k, effectively no additional increase in pay will make you happier. We ignore the fact that one of the greatest determinants of happiness in your job is the degree to which it aligns with your values, and how nice of people your coworkers are. The concept of picking a job based on how much free time, vacation time, and PTO is almost an unheard of concept. The idea that we would pick a job that is conducive to the two greatest determinants of our physical well being and emotional fulfillment (our health and friendships) is largely out of popular culture.
The greater the amount of money a person makes, the more emotional prestige is attached to that job. Psychologically, it’s not the money we want, but the feeling of prestige and admiration. If computer scientists and Engineers made minimum wage and employees working at McDonald’s and Walmart make 100k a year, then suddenly the narrative would shift. Our youtube recommendations would be filled with day in the life of a McDonald’s or Walmart worker, rather than of a computer scientist or Engineer. The narrative would shift, emotional prestige would be shifted to these workers, and people would crave that admiration and respect and try their best to get into these high wage jobs.
If being homeless was prestigious, then masses of people would strive to be homeless. If being impoverished was prestigious, then masses of people would strive to be impoverished. Again, it’s not the status goods or occupations we want, it’s fundamentally the emotions that we want.
As society becomes more increasingly secular and technologically advanced, money becomes our new god. The people who have a lot of it become demigods. These demigods are fervently praised, admired, and looked up to. Documentaries and interviews are made about them: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. It is true indeed that these people have done great things, but many other people have done equally impressive things and are not praised in this way because they didn’t make money doing it. Troves of people work to develop the skills needed to enter their slices of supposed heaven on earth and pass through those pearly gates into their dream company. Masses of people give them admiration, which creates prestige and impels the masses to strive to become demigods as well. But after ~12,000 years of society and technology, we still can’t quite answer this question: what is it all for? What is it that we’re actually aiming for in the long run? If we’re collectively working so much, what is it that we’re collectively so much or?
All of this to say that In our culture, we’re expected to get all of our emotional satisfaction and fulfillment from our career and our spouse. That’s a historically unprecedented amount of stress on two things to be absolutely perfect. And if you want a recipe for high societal dissatisfaction with both, then the best way to do that is to have incredibly high expectations for both.
Dating
Due to transportation innovations coupled with the focus on career, we have difficulty maintaining face to face long-term relationships. We’ve also developed technology to try to deal with this difficulty of maintaining relationships when many of the people you know move away. This innovation has come in the form of dating apps.
Personally, I have no use for dating apps. They don’t remedy the problem, they just try to give us something that seems to remedy the problem. Dating apps like Tinder and others can usually only provide superficial connections. Since I’ve never tried Tinder before, I won’t talk too much about it because I don’t know too much about it. However, the point is that it’s an attempted but largely disappointing solution at trying to give humans meaningful and satisfying relationships. You may have felt this before.
Friends
Again, due to increasing mobility, and an increasing focus on career as we begin to worship not gods but people (due to the fact that it seems to be in our nature to praise something), we culturally place very little emphasis on friendship. We try to remedy this with social media apps, but from my limited interaction with these, almost all of them breed an environment of superficiality do to the algorithm having a recency bias and catering to shorter and shorter videos and strings of texts. It would be bad enough if people could only see each other for 10 minute increments (like on youtube shorts or tik tok), or in a couple of pictures (like on instagram), or could only speak up to 140 words (like historically on twitter) at a time; but to top it all of a lot of the people that are seen on the our pocket TV’s are not even there with us physically. Again, it seems to remedy the issue, but it does not.
An Aside
Interestingly, none of us voted on if we wanted to have phones. I believe that technology influences politics and social life, not the other way around. We have no vote on what truly matters, which is technological advancement. But we do have a trivially small on which of the alternatives that technology is forcing us to do socially or politically.
So there’s a short estimation of what’s happening in the US when it comes to how we satisfy our evolutionary needs in a modern world. It turns out, some of the forces of modernization are not conducive to putting us in an environment we were evolved to live in and causes us to be disoriented and not get enough of our emotional needs fulfillingly met.
The Paradox of Modernity
The paradox of modernity is that the mental, physical, and emotional health of people seems to be getting worse despite all of our labor and technological advancements. Isn’t our work, technology, and innovation supposed to have made our lives more fulfilling? Strangely it doesn’t seem to have.
The paradox of modernity is accurately summed up by the surprising—or perhaps not so surprising—statistics about the US at the beginning of this post.
Why do we work approximately twice as much as hunter gatherers—and yet our emotional well being seems to not only be worse then theirs, but actually declining (as far as we can gauge from suicide rate increases, depression increases, friend decreases, etc).
This presents a huge paradox in the modern world. After all, isn’t the primary reason we invent new technology to save us time, labor, and make our lives better?
We’ve had ~12,000 years since the neolithic revolution and the dawn of organized society to create a utopia. Twelve thousand years. Why are we not in a utopia? Why is it that in the midst of our plenty, the “U.S. suicide rate [has increased by] 30% between 2000 and 2020”?
Technology—particularly industrialization—has allowed us to create physical goods at an unbelievably efficient rate and at extremely low cost. There are many successes of modern society, but perhaps just as many failings—particularly when it comes to uplifting a person’s physical and mental health. The statistics reflect this.
It can be argued that we have much more medical technology to prevent diseases—until you realize that many of the diseases that we have today are the result of humans living in societies. In hunter gatherer societies, there world be no worldwide pandemics, no worldwide diseases. Only when the population density is high enough do diseases spread. Hunter gatherers built up a resistance to the diseases that were in their environment. So I'm not buying too heavily in that diseases are greatly reduced in the modern world. Especially considering that we’ve essentially swapped some diseases for other ones. We’ve traded malaria for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Much more could be said on this.
The industrial revolution has allowed—for the first time in human history—the lower and middle classes to actually have any form of disposable income. As such, the lower and middle classes rarely starve to death anymore. Further, most people in society even get to eat something everyday. These are historical anomalies. All of these things would not be possible without the industrial revolution and industrialization of agriculture.
The industrial revolution has made us are abundantly, extravagantly, and outlandishly rich in terms of physical possessions. If you look around right now it’s hard to name one thing we could actually make on our own right now. but—as evidenced by the statistics—bereft and impoverished in terms of emotional ones. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Due to increased mobility of people and emphasis on career our friends move away. We’ve tried to solve this problem with social media, but that actually ended up making us less social. We’ve tried to do the same thing with dating apps. In our culture, it’s acceptable to leave your friends and family in the pursuit of money and prestige. Culturally, all of the other aspects of our lives is fitted around our career.
If It makes money it’s good
However, the question that in my mind seems to be more and more pressing in my mind is this: how can we separate out the good parts of society, from the bad parts? Namely, how can I get all of the good parts of society, while not partaking in the bad parts?
The Summarized Situation
Here’s a summarized approximated version of the situation.
The situation, summarized:
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Fundamentally, we want emotions. We don’t truly want physical goods. We don’t have an evolutionary need for a Louis Vutton handbag, but we do evolutionary crave social acceptance and prestige. Needs are finite, wants are infinite.
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The best things in life are free. Friendship, crushes, love, appreciation, dancing, smiling, walking, and all of the most satisfying things in life are free.
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Industrialization is incredible at producing things, but hardly makes an impact on improving our deeper emotional needs.
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In an increasingly secular society, money has become our new god.
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For us, money is not inherently good or bad. It is primarily just a tool for purchasing products, services, and facilitating experiences.
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Capitalism in our industrial economy is extremely good at what it does: facilitate the production of products at incredible scales. It’s goal is not to emotionally fulfill people—despite the efforts of advertising to convince you otherwise.
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Advertising tries to conflate our emotional wants with wanting a product. This does not solve our emotional problems. This is part of the reason the emotional and mental health of the US is declining.
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You have the ability to collaboratively plan, imagine, and carve out a life you want for yourself with your friends now and that you can develop.
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If you don’t consciously and deliberate prioritize your dreams, then they will simply never happen.
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Good Health and great relationships and friendships are the two biggest determinants of well being. Devote conscious and deliberate effort towards these ends or die regretting you didn’t.
Possible solutions
I’ve got a lot of these. Some of them I’m doing now, others I plan to write about in the future. Most of them you may not have heard of.
But for now, I’ll leave u on a cliffhanger!