The Human Animal
To sort out our present predicament, we have to take the long view of human history.
To fully grasp the moment we find ourselves in, we must examine it through the long view of human history. The vast majority, 99.9%, of human existence on this planet has been in a hunter-gatherer state. Our present-day brains and bodies were designed for this mode of living rather than the hyper-connected, distracted world of technology we currently occupy. As the technological creep continues to insert itself into every facet of our lives, we become more disconnected from our natural way of living. This disconnect is causing a whole host of physical and mental problems.
In the 21st Century, corporations have successfully hacked our biological construction for profit, and, as a result, our physical and mental health is steadily declining. Unless we are savvy enough to outsmart the algorithmic salesmanship streaming to us through the extra appendage we have acquired (our beloved smartphones), we will become fatter and sadder with each passing scroll and purchase.
The food industry has understood—and mastered—the profit of hijacking our biology for some time now. Dense calories—packed with salt, sugar, and fat, light up our brains and trigger our desire to ingest as much as possible. In the savannah, where capturing precious calories was often preceded by tracking prey over miles or spending most of the day foraging, gorging ourselves was essential for survival. We needed meat on our bones to survive the lean times we went out on the hunt but came up short. In the era of DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Postmates, we send hired drivers out on the hunt while we stream Netflix on the couch. Our biology is working against us.
Similar hijacking principles are applied to our ability to process vast amounts of information designed to manipulate, sell, and commodify our attention. To understand this manipulation in its all-encompassing form, we first must understand the human being, homo sapien, as the storytelling animal. Historian Noah Yuval Harari best outlines our species’ trajectory in his book, Sapiens.
For the sake of time, let’s boil the 200,000-year history of homo sapien into a Cliff-notes version essential for understanding our modern lives in the 21st Century. Around 70,000 years ago, the theory goes, the human-animal underwent a mental transformation called the cognitive revolution. This shift in the human brain allowed homo sapien to do something that no other animal on the planet (at least that we presently know for sure) could do — imagine things that are not real. This shift would ultimately change the course of human history (and the planet) into the civilization we now experience —a modern world overrun with hairless, upright mammals, complete with a neocortex that allows us to (sometimes) execute rational thought.
The transformative power of the cognitive revolution cannot be overstated. It is the feature of the human animal that allows us to cooperate en masse and thus gives rise to every institution that now guides our lives—education, science, government, and economics. All these structures were created due to our ability to imagine things that did not already exist and spread these invented stories widely—so far and wide that they have become our commonly accepted operating manual. Our common stories have become so successfully adopted that we take them for granted at every turn.
The best example is the modern economy. A dollar has no inherent value to the human animal. It is a piece of paper, a promise, and yet we exchange the dollar, or the even less tangible digital version of it through the swipe of a credit card, for things of inherent value — food, shelter, clothing. We do this because we believe in a common story about currency and the economy. This mass cooperation, this common belief in a story, has allowed the human animal to build the structures of our modern lives and, ultimately, take over the planet.
But there is a bug in this extraordinary feature of the human mind.
A bug presently being exploited with breathtaking speed and efficiency. Our ability to imagine is also intertwined with our ability to be led astray and to develop deep beliefs in things that are not real. Conspiracy theories, doctored photos on Instagram, or TikTok videos that hack our subconscious when we hover over a video a second longer are feeding us, over and over again, with content solely designed to keep us on the platform longer. Content that will suck more of our most precious resource, our attention, into the app.
Not content that informs us or helps us grow, learn, or improve our lives in any significant way. It is quite the contrary.
Like the food industry pushing and selling the cheapest and least nutritious but most “biologically tasty” calories at us for profit, the tech industry is peddling the technological equivalent of Doritos.
When Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and author Michael Moss wrote his 2021 investigative book on the food industry, HOOKED: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions, he discovered one of the most insidious aspects of modern food design. Highly processed foods are designed never to be fully satisfying.
To leave the human being with the desire not to feel quite full and to want to go back for more. These food products are designed to trigger a dopamine response and prevent our neocortex from jumping into action. They do this by adding salt, sugar, and fat to processed food that hits the brain quickly. Scientists have long evaluated the addictiveness of drugs to the speed at which they hit our system. It turns out— nothing hits our brain as quickly as sugar.
A 60 Minutes special from 2012 demonstrated this same principle. Their reporting follows a group of “flavor scientists” in a scene where they are out in an orange grove doing a taste test for future products. The designers pick and taste an orange, noting that they couldn’t create a flavor that would taste as satisfying as the actual orange for the corporate food complex, saying, “You want a burst in the beginning, and maybe a finish that doesn’t linger too much so that you want more.” Why? Because the flavor of orange is so deeply satisfying, so rich and powerful in citrus, our brains register a sense of satisfaction. When the measure of success is getting the customer to over-consume because they are not quite sated, you just undershoot the target.
The same principle is true of the architecture pervasive in tech industry products. Tech merchants want their products to be slightly unsatisfying, so the user stays hungry. The design is to prevent a sense of closure—the bottomless news and social feeds or the Netflix episode that begins playing automatically without your consent. The products are designed to have no end, and they are deemed more successful if they can capture your attention in perpetuity. It is obesity of the mind.
In the same way that food is essential for survival in the 21st Century, so too is technology. Most professions require us to be plugged in, and the lucky few can abstain—the lifeblood of our economic survival is often intertwined with these platforms. So while we can quit cold turkey from many other addictive substances, such as alcohol and cigarettes, food and technology are both unavoidable and addictive.
Our brains and bodies were not designed for this novel technological environment, and the algorithms work faster and smarter than we are. Harari writes in his more recent book, 21 Lessons for the 21 Century, “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.” But clarity stems from knowledge, a commitment to scholarship, that is on the decline, and this, I wonder, is there a different story that might help us?
William James, one of the founders of psychology as a discipline, wrote in Principles of Psychology in 1890, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”
For James, in the 1800s, the ability to attend was conducted in a much simpler time. How might James consider the state of our attention in 2023—where distraction and interruption are ubiquitous? Where the incessant pinging for our attention makes deep and considered thought a rare commodity? And is it the same thing that this is being stolen from us, our attention, that will allow us to harness the power needed to regain our agency? The attention to know how we are being manipulated so we have the chance to choose for ourselves.
If there is one lesson to take away from Harari’s Sapiens, it is that story is powerful and that attending to common stories is how our homo sapien ancestors shaped the world that we now live in.
In this light, I will argue that we need a new story. One that emphasizes the progress that we so often take for granted. One that reveals a world so full of wealth that we are left with one responsibility—to use our minds well. One that reminds us of how lucky we are to exist in a time when so much of the most difficult labor of living is automated—where we have the luxury of time to learn, create, and pursue our interests like no other generation that has walked the planet. One that emphasizes meaning and purpose over the incessant drumbeat of finding happiness.
Happiness is a fleeting feeling. It is designed to be so, and the chase of it is a vulnerable target for commodification in the 21st Century. Meaning and purpose, rather, are derived through hard work, through doing difficult things, and the satisfaction derived from that effort.
Meaning and purpose are drawn from a commitment to something greater than yourself. It is an emotion with staying power. It is a common story—that centers these ideas at the core—that might have the power to reshape our collective experience. And maybe, just maybe, save us from the Metaverse.
