Sugar and spice and all things nice

We have always known that our craving for salt, sugar, and fatty foods is a vestigial remnant of our evolution as a species. These were rare commodities that were needed to create life, and we binged on them when we found them to stock up on the good stuff. Our modern world gives us unlimited access to sugar and salt in deadly quantities, and our primeval cravings are giving us insulin resistance and obesity.

Today, it occurred to me that I might have missed an obvious connection. We are a social species, and the interaction between us is what sets us apart from our close simian relatives. In his book *Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind*, Yuval Noah Harari writes about how our highly evolved social skills are what our civilization is built on. He argues that we are the only form of life that can scale the size of a group into the millions and still get big projects done. He expands this to include our ability to follow the abstract. We follow leaders who have died centuries ago, and we believe the ideas and concepts that were given to our forefathers, even though we have no personal interaction with the founders.

This is what makes us human. Our brains are wired for this interaction and positive reinforcement loops. When we do or say something that gets positive feedback, it reinforces that act. If we get our "arse kicked," we learn to act differently. We improve and become better humans based on the feedback we get from others. This is very important during our formative years and very difficult to reprogram in our adulthood. Even as adults, we are not beyond the reach of our design. We still live for praise and the adoration of our peers.

Social media feeds into our deepest fears and exploits our desire to be loved, funny, and connected. Like the salt and sugar example, what was once a fundamental requirement of our existence is now so freely available to us that it makes us sick.

This sickness is not the kind that can be diagnosed with a blood test or treated with insulin. It is a parasitic infection in our souls. The only way to protect ourselves from this is to identify the problem and understand that we are entirely unprepared for it. Nothing in our 50,000-year history has prepared us for this crisis. We are in fact defenseless against this new threat to our existence.

I am not going to advise everyone to limit their kids' screen time or throw out their devices. The genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back in. The only way to the other side is to push on through. Once we see the threat to our civilization for what it is, it begins to lose some of its magical hold on us.

When we learn to assume that all posts are fake until proven true, we are on the right track. Each "like" must be seen for what it is: a gratuitous gesture that is given without any affection.

Once we face our demons, we who created the beast might find ways to tame the creature or at the very least clip its wings. My generation was exposed to technology after we were fully formed. The technology is clearly dangerous, but it might be too late for it to bend our perception too far off center. This is more than I can say for our children who don't know any world other than the one we find ourselves in.

Just saying. Be careful. 

See the real dangers for what they really are, and you might not be afraid of everything that goes bump in the night.

𝓜 𝓟𝓪𝓻𝓪𝓴 

Sep 2023