In the modern world many people (including me) feel that areas of their lives unfulfilling.
Why?
First, some principles:
- Evolution adapts organisms to a particular environment. If that environment changes, evolution starts adapting organisms to the new environment.
- The longer the environment remains stable, the more time evolution has to act, and hence the better adapted organisms become to that environment.
- Environmental change can occur much faster than evolution can act.
- After a period of rapid environmental change, initially organisms will still be adapted to their previous environment. Over time, evolution will act to adapt organisms to the new environment; however, this may take many orders of magnitude longer than the environmental change event.
- In such a system, directly after (or during) periods of major, rapid environmental change, organisms will likely be very poorly adapted (”mismatched”) to their new environment.
- For an extreme example, imagine polar bear flying to Hawaii. It’s environmental change is almost instantaneous, and upon arriving, is very poorly adapted to its new environment. Eventually though, presuming the Hawaiian environment didn’t change too much for a few million years, the Polar Bear’s offspring would evolve to become more and more well adapted to living in Hawaii. Until then however, they would be mismatched to their environment, and probably quire hot and miserable.
Now, using those principles:
- As feelings of fulfillment are activated by biochemical processes, they are genetically controlled and subject to evolution.
- Therefore, evolution should result in tendency towards the amount of fulfilment gained from a task becoming proportional to its importance for survival and reproduction in that environment.
- So, after a prolonged period of environmental stability, we would expect an organism’s most fulfilling activities to be those which are the most important for its survival/reproduction (in that environment). Such a state was likely last achieved by humans after spending >5 million years living as stone age nomads.
- Introduction of technology and civilization over the last 3000 years represents a huge, rapid, ongoing (and exponentially increasing) environmental change event for the human species.
- Following the logic, humans are likely still predominantly adapted to their previous (stone age) environment, and very poorly adapted to their new environment*. This is encapsulated by the phrase “our modern skulls house a stone age mind”, one of the central tenets of evolutionary psychology.
- As humans are still adapted to their previous (stone age) environment, it follows that the activities humans will find most fulfilling are also those that are most important for survival and reproduction their previous (stone age) environment.
Phew. We got there. So what does all that mean?
Well it means that the things we most enjoy in life should be the things we would be doing if we were living a stone age life. Guess what – like the saying goes, they’re free. Hunting, fishing, cooking, building (tree)houses, dams, and making tools; teaching, communal singing and all things relating to small tribal societies – the list goes on. What It definitely doesn’t include, is sitting at a computer all day not really interacting with other people – which is what many people’s jobs and lives consist of in the modern world.
*The issue is muddied by the fact that in this instance the environmental change has actually been caused by humans themselves, and so, in some aspects at least, they are likely not to be as poorly adapted to their new environment as they would be otherwise.
