We Were Never Meant to Live Like This

All right. So, this started when I was about 12 in the 1980s, and I just started looking around at the adults in my life. I guess I was paying closer attention, and I started to notice something. It seemed that every single one of them [clears throat] was tired or exhausted. And I don't mean occasionally exhausted, or, you know, exhausted from a hard week or whatever. This was more like a permanent condition that they suffered from. It was like their lives had been slowly squeezed out of them by some process that nobody had bothered to define or label. I guess so. They'd come home after work, and they would turn on the TV, or they would go to the mall and buy more crap that they didn't need, and they would act as if this was actually healthy and, uh, wasn't going to contribute to more of their suffering. And I remember thinking, even back then, before I really had any language for any of this, that something about that whole arrangement felt fundamentally wrong.

Um, [clears throat] and the thing that I found even more difficult to deal with was the fact that, uh, if I made the mistake of saying any of this out loud and, and, you know, complaining about any of these observations that I was having, I was immediately met with the same response every time, which was pretty much, um, well, you know the one. Well, think about the kids in China or Africa. If you don't like America, you can leave. Which, um, yeah, sure. Okay. I'm 12. I'll get right on that. Uh, let me just finish my homework, and then I'll arrange my own geopolitical relocation. And by the way, that argument, um, in philosophical terms, is known as a logical fallacy. It's called, um, [clears throat] a relative privation, to be exact. Which is, this is the idea that because somebody somewhere else has it worse than you, your observations about your own situation are automatically null and void. And it's a remarkably effective way to shut people up, though it is a deeply flawed way to do it. And, you know, as a kid, uh, it worked on me for a while because, well, I mean, underneath it, there was the whole guilt trip part of it, right? And as you well know, guilt is a very efficient mechanism for keeping people from asking those pesky, inconvenient questions that reveal a deeper truth.

So I guess what I didn't understand then, and what took me years to actually be able to articulate, is that what I was noticing, it wasn't ingratitude or anything like that. Uh, it wasn't that I was some, you know, spoiled, ungrateful ingrate, uh, who hated everything about my country and just wanted to leave as soon as possible, forever. I think what I was experiencing was something more like, I was have, I was getting an accurate read on a situation that, um, most people around me just had, they'd been trained to not see it, or they'd been, or they just chose to not see it because the system that we live. And, and I want to be a little careful here because I'm not interested in supporting victim mentality. I don't think that framing gets anyone anywhere useful. The system that we live in [clears throat] is truly, it's demonstrably misaligned with what human beings actually need to feel okay.

So, [sighs and gasps] you know, there, now there's a, a significant body of research that gives that feeling a name, um, officially, I guess, and it's called evolutionary mismatch. And once you understand what that means, a lot of things start to make a different kind of sense. So the thing that I think most people intuitively sense, but they've never really had the framework to articulate, is that the human animal, and I mean that literally, not metaphorically, is still biologically a hunter-gatherer. And the brain that is running your life right now, uh, with a nervous system that's producing all of that anxiety and, and that exhaustion, it was shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of a certain kind of existence that we don't have anymore. So we had, we used to have small groups of people who knew each other and, uh, who were living in a much, I guess, deeper relationship with the land and, and in each other's survival, and they also lived with, um, [clears throat] seasonal rhythms that gave existence a kind of structure that we have, um, completely lost. That's what we were streamlined for. Um, that's the environment that shaped every instinct and, and, and stress response that we have now. And it also shaped every need for belonging and connection that keeps you up at night, calibrated for that world. And then, in roughly the last 150 years or so, we built something that is so completely different from that environment that our own nervous system just barely recognizes it anymore. And we just kind of assume that we would adapt to it. Well, we haven't adapted. And what we've done instead is to develop this, uh, civilization-wide set of symptoms that we keep treating as personal problems rather than the structural ones that they really are.

There's a researcher at the University of Zurich named Colin Shaw who, uh, he, he put this pretty bluntly when he argued that chronic stress and, uh, you know, widespread health concerns, these things are coming from a fundamental mismatch between our nature-shaped physiology and the highly industrialized and, and, and mechanized environments that most of us live in these days. And the most important part of this, and the part that I find the most interesting, is that he said this: that this mismatch, it's not going to correct itself through evolutionary processes because evolution is just too slow, and, and we are moving too fast. So now, this means we are on our own. And I think the data that follows from this is pretty interesting because clinical depression is exceptionally rare among traditional hunter-gatherer communities. So, all right, take for example, the, uh, Kuli people of Papua New Guinea. There's only one in 2,000 [clears throat] individuals who meet the diagnostic criteria for depression. Now, on the other hand, in industrialized nations, modern industrialized nations, we're looking at a rate of around 400 people out of every 2,000, or that's about 20% of the population, though I would be willing to argue it's probably higher than that. That is not exactly a marginal difference. Um, that seems to me like a very loud signal that it should be, you know, impossible to ignore. And yet, somehow that we've managed to do just that for the most part because we live in an ongoing state of denial.

So there's a botanist by the name of Robin Wall Kimmerer who is a member of the Potawatomi nation, and she has studied this relationship that exists between humans and the natural world, and I think she's done it in such a way that most Western scientists don't really have the language for. So Kimmerer describes something that she calls the, um, the grammar of animacy. And so that's the concept that indigenous languages encode a relationship with the natural world that treats it like it's alive, like it's, uh, kin. So [sighs] basically what that means is, from their perspective, um, the natural world is something that you exist in relationship with, not something that you extract from. And so her argument essentially is that when you sever that relationship, and when you reduce the natural world to just a, um, a resource, and, um, you reduce yourself to nothing more than a consumer, um, something in the human animal goes wrong at a very deep level, which, I don't know. I, I think that's just a very nice way of saying that, um, we've been treating the symptoms while actually making the disease worse. You know, a $200 a month therapy app on your phone, I don't think that's going to reach what's actually broken deep down. And we've been figuring this out the hard way for a very long time at this point.

So, um, all right, let me try to get a little bit more specific about what this, this mismatch actually looks like on a, a daily basis because I think, you know, it's one thing to say that we weren't built for this world, but it's another thing to actually see where the gears are grinding. So let's take the social comparison problem. Um, so the human brain has a, like a, a status tracking system. Um, this is the part that's constantly monitoring where you stand relative to the people around you. So this tracking system, it was calibrated for a community of about 150 people, and these are people you actually knew and whose lives that you actually, you know, you had actual context for. But now, that same system is running against 8 billion people, and most of them are presenting the highlight reel version of their existence. So the anxiety that produces, it isn't, I wouldn't really call it a character flaw. I think what it is, it's like an ancient piece of machinery that's being asked to do something that it was never designed for. So, all right, look at it this way. Uh, it's like asking a sundial to tell you the time in 17 different time zones at the same time. The sundial is not broken. It's just, it works fine. It's just the situation is completely insane.

And then, of course, there's, um, the, uh, the information problem. Uh, so humans evolved to process the amount of information available in a small community, pretty much over the course of about [snorts] a day. Um, but what we're dealing with now, before you've even had your breakfast, is, um, you know, that would have taken our ancestors several months to experience. And the brain doesn't have, it doesn't really have an off switch for this. It just keeps processing, and it, it keeps, you know, threat assessing and trying to make sense of this massive volume of input that it was never built to handle. And then we wonder why we can't [snorts] sleep, and we have anxiety, and etcetera, and etcetera.

And, uh, underneath all of this is the apathy, which I think is the part that we, we should pay the most attention to because it, it usually, you know, apathy usually gets misread as laziness or depression, when in truth, it's something more specific. Um, Johann Hari, who I've mentioned a few times before, uh, in past videos. Uh, so he identified what he called, um, nine disconnections at the root of, uh, what most of what we're experiencing. So these are things like, um, disconnection from meaningful work, uh, from community, disconnection from nature, uh, purpose and meaning. And now, what I find interesting about this is that every single one of those disconnections connects directly to something that the evolutionary mismatch took from us. So it's not coincidence, and this is just the organism accurately reporting what it has been deprived of. So the apathy, that's what happens when that deprivation goes on for long, a long enough period of time. The system, it doesn't just, you know, crash in some dramatic fashion or something. It just kind of slowly powers down, and it gradually withdraws investment from [snorts] things that used to matter. So, at some point, you realize that you don't really care about much anymore, but you don't, or you can't quite remember when that started, which is kind of alarming because, you know, at least depression, when that comes on, it, it, it tends to announce itself. Um, but apathy, on the other hand, you know, that, at least from what I've noticed, it sort of, you know, discreetly arranges the furniture, so to speak, until one day you look around the room, and it's completely empty.

And I think here's where the accountability part matters because the mismatch and the structural conditions, those are legitimate. They're legitimate issues. But nonetheless, we do still have choices inside of all of that. And I think the thing is, the apathy can become its own trap if we let it. You know, the system, it benefits from our disengagement as much as it benefits from our compliance because, well, checked-out people don't, um, organize, right? They don't build alternatives. Uh, they don't push back on anything. So the apathy isn't just a symptom, and at a certain point, it becomes a feature that's just serving the system, even as it destroys the individual running it.

So, I want to be, try to be careful in talking about this next part because I, I think it can, it can slide pretty easily into the more, well, let's say, extreme batshit crazy end of conspiracy theory territory, or just pure grievance, I guess. But whatever the case, I'm not really interested in e, in either of those directions here. What I am interested in is just being honest about how the hell we got here and how the conditions got so much worse so fast. And the short answer is, as far as I can tell, is that somebody was making money from it. What a shocker that is. So there's, um, a British writer named, uh, George Monbiot, who's been talking about this stuff for a long time, and he's made the point that all of this atomization of modern life, uh, it isn't just some, you know, unfortunate, uh, side effect of progress. It's actually a structural feature of the, of the economic system that we built. And, and [clears throat] the logic, once you see it, it, it's pretty hard to shake. So, a genuine community produces people who don't need to buy things to feel better about themselves because they have each other. They have enough. But "enough," that's the equivalent of a, a four-letter word, uh, you know, to an economy that insists that you never have enough. So instead, you end up with this world that's been very deliberately designed to make community a lot harder to come by. And I don't mean that in a tinfoil hat way or anything. Um, I mean, take a look around. Look at how things are built. Look at the way cities are sprawling. So that it's pretty much mandatory to have a car to get anywhere, and therefore, actually, um, you know, running into someone you might know, or, or even someone you don't, you don't know who you might want to get to know by accident. That whole process has become like a minor miracle these days. So more and more of our experience involves isolation now.

And then there is the, um, well, there's the, the, the whole surveillance issue, um, which at this point has become like, it's just the, the background radiation of daily life now. I mean, obviously, we've got our, our phones that are constantly tracking us and listening. We've got Flock cameras popping up everywhere. They're reading, they're reading your license plates. Um, there's new cars coming out, I think, next year, that, um, they're going to come equipped with inward-pointing cameras. Um, so not only are you being watched in your car, um, the amount of control that you have over your own car will be compromised to the point where you have to wonder if it's the car that actually belongs to you. Then, of course, there's the, you know, all the doorbell cameras, the Ring cameras, which you're feeding into a network that law enforcement can access without your knowledge. Um, and you've also got, you know, the grocery stores, uh, they're experimenting with this new, what's, what do they call it? Dynamic, the dynamic pricing model, which is basically built around charging you a different price for the same item based on your purchase history. Um, you know, I mean, at this point, there are cities where your face is being matched against a database in real time because you walked down the wrong street. And of course, all of this is is framed as, um, safety and convenience, which, interestingly, those are the two words that, uh, have been used to justify basically every erosion of privacy in human history. I mean, how long will it be until we have cameras built into our toilets, trained on our asses, under the premise that, uh, it's to monitor what we eat, you know, in order to make sure that we are eating the, uh, so-called correct food that's prescribed by the system? I know it sounds a little crazy, but a lot of the things that are happening now sounded crazy 10 years ago.

Um, so I think it was David Graeber who who wrote about a concept that he called, it was something like, um, the living death of capitalist alienation, which is, um, it's, it's the way the system severs people from any real sense of meaning or agency, and then sells them like a simulation of it. So you're not actually building anything in that type of system. You're buying the aesthetic of having built something. And so the gap between those two things, that's where a great deal of the damage is happening. And, um, I want to come back to the accountability point here because I think it's significant for the reason that, so the establishment is designed the way it is for reasons that serve the establishment, uh, mainly to serve the people running the establishment. And we still got to make choices inside of that system every day, regardless. Now, these two things are not mutually exclusive. So I think, you know, when blaming the system entirely, that's not any better than blaming yourself entirely. And I think the honest position in all of this is somewhere in the uncomfortable middle, um, where you acknowledge both, and, uh, you know, then you have to figure out what you're actually going to do about it.

All right. So, here's the thing. I'm not going to sit here and try to instruct anybody with, um, [clears throat] some simple five-step plan that consists of, you know, mostly a bunch of empty platitudes. Now, for one reason, [sighs and gasps] I'm still figuring things out for myself. And for another reason, the version of this that, um, you know, comes with some kind of snake oil sounding answer, I guess, that feels about as effective to me as a, uh, fortune cookie. But I do want to talk about what's already happening out there because, believe it or not, there are some things happening that I find encouraging that I wasn't really expecting. So, I keep hearing stories about people who are just stopping. Um, they've [clears throat] stopped pretending that their corporate job made sense or provided something meaningful or purposeful in their lives. And they've stopped buying that they don't need. [clears throat] And they've done things like they've started to grow food, or raising chickens, or what have you. And, you know, they're moving to smaller places, um, where they actually have a little bit more sense of a community and more of a likelihood of knowing their neighbors. And they're just, they're thinking more about sustainability and, and having less dependency on the whole corporate structure that's controlling everything. And, you know, I don't think these people are, they're not romantics or escapists or whatever. I think they're just paying attention to what's happening and they're trying to take some realistic, actionable steps to respond to it. And it's not easy, of course, because they know that nobody's coming to save them. And they're doing this in a way, most of them are doing this in a way that's not performative. Um, you know, they're not trying to make some big statement on social media.

There, you know, currently exists some intentional communities, um, that have, uh, most people have assumed died out in the 1970s, I guess. So, one that comes to mind that's been around for almost 60 years is, um, Twin Oaks in Virginia. So, there's about 100 people living there, and they've got 485 acres, which is a lot of land. They're financially self-sufficient, and they're still going strong, which, you've got to admit, that's pretty impressive. So, and I think, you know, what they're doing, it, it doesn't necessarily have to be a template for every, every other place, but it, it is definitely evidence that there is an alternative is possible to what we're living in. Um, and it's not just some, you know, pie in the sky theoretical fantasy or something. Especially, um, you know, now, now we hear about all this, um, talk about how the food supply in the US is highly toxic. And so there's been an increased interest in people growing food, especially over the last six years or so since, uh, 2020 COVID era. Um, and the whole homesteading thing, [clears throat] you know, I think that's, that's going from something quaint to something, um, [snorts] I'd say that's almost radical because something is pulling people back from, or back toward a scale of life that actually makes sense for the kind of animal we are.

There is a, um, a Dutch historian by the name of Rutger Bregman who spent years studying that, we're studying what humans are actually like when you remove the conditions that make [clears throat] us behave badly. And so his conclusion was that cooperation is actually our default setting, which I know certainly doesn't look that way when you observe society now because the aggressive and atomized, you know, every person for themselves version of human nature that this current system depends on, well, that's actually the aberration. That is, this is not normal what's happening. Um, which, to my thinking, means that the biology is working with us here. I think that's something worth knowing, anyway, for whatever it's worth. And, and look, you know, the accountability part, because I don't want to leave this as some purely, I guess, structural argument where the system is guilty and we're all just a bunch of helpless passengers in it. The establishment was designed to make disengagement easy and resistance hard. But, you know, we, we still have to push back anyway, even, even, uh, if it's just partially or imperfectly, because the alternative is basically apathy, right? And we already know where that leads things. And I guess as far as the technology part of all of this goes, I'm not anti-phone. I'm not anti-internet. I use it very often, just like pretty much everyone else. I think the, the question is just whether we're using it, or it's using us. And yeah, that is a line that's a lot blurrier than most people want to admit, including me. I think the tech, the technology is fine. We just have to develop a much healthier relationship with it, which I think is possible.

So, yeah, you know, we were never meant to live like this. And I've pretty much believed that since I was around 12 years old. And I was watching the adults around me disappear, you know, into the exhaustion and the shopping malls and what have you. And into these lives of, um, [clears throat] you know, that looked like they, they looked dystopian, even though I, I was totally unaware of that word at that age. And the thing is, I've also stopped believing that the answer is going to come from some, I don't know, grand systemic overhaul, um, that arrives from outside somewhere and fixes everything somehow, because again, nobody is coming to save us. I think the solutions, if there are solutions, they're smaller. Um, you know, and they're, they're more personal. And I think it's more so, it's more about building [clears throat] day-to-day habits that you develop. You know, it's about, um, neuroplasticity and just, I guess, it's making a series of choices, you know, one at a time, that are moving in the direction of something that actually makes sense for the kind of creature that you really are. Though, I'm well aware that that's a very difficult thing to do. And I guess that's all I have to say about that for today. Thank you so much for listening.