Unadaptable

It's a dark night in the caves, with no light or warmth. The year is 50,000 B.C., and humans are struggling to survive in a dangerous environment, with harsh weather conditions, poor night vision, no fur, and plenty of faster, stronger animals looking to feast. Surviving on your own is a death sentence, as you are only one person and can't gather all the resources yourself. You find a group of other humans to survive with, as they can provide you safety, security, warmth (both physical and mental), and reproduction. Being close to other humans is a comforting feeling for them, as it makes them feel less alone in this truly dangerous world. Humans are also lacking in nutrients, needing highly rare nutrients, known as 'sugar', 'salt', and 'fat'. These nutrients are extremely hard to come by, so humans cherish it with their soul. They stock up on these nutrients heavily, as it will get them through the hard winters, and they also have no idea when they will come across these nutrients again; they are a rare commodity that must be treasured and kept in abundance. After a long day of working hard, walking dozens of miles, and carrying out emotionally burdensome tasks, humans play. We engage in recreation; we create fun sports and playtime, to replenish our energy, and heal ourselves. We also make sure to keep our other fellow humans and tribe members happy, living in peace and harmony, as we know that if we disrupt the social dynamic in the group, we will be abandoned, left out alone in the dark forest, where we cannot protect ourselves. We do things to prove to the other humans that we are valuable, that we are important; we prove our strength, make ourselves look beautiful, and be of value to the tribe. This keeps us in the tribe, and, as a result, prevents us from being left alone in the forest to die alone. We do everything we can to survive, and our biology rewards us with positive feelings.

This begs the question... what the hell happened to humans? If we look at it objectively, what does any of this mean to us anymore? And why the hell do we crave it so damn much still?

'Sugar', 'salt', and 'fat', revered as the utmost cherished nutrients of humans of old, are now the most demonized nutrients by humans. Sugar, salt, and fat are in such abundance now, that we are having to stop ourselves from consuming so much of it, because we are wired to seek it out so much. No longer are these vital nutrients so rare to come across, and in fact, are the most common food in modern America; you can't enter a single damn supermarket without seeing something that is loaded with sugar, salt, and fat. We are in an absolute abundance of resources, something we never would have planned many, many thousands of years ago.

'Friends' are, logically, completely useless now; they do not help you survive, they do not give you extra resources, and for many people, friends are simply just people to talk to, hang out with, and share common interests with. They serve no real purpose to your survival. No wonder people manage to feel so lonely nowadays, despite the fact that they are surrounded by people.

Being scared of the dark nowadays is completely useless, as we now have access to night-vision goggles and high-powered flashlights. Animals are no longer a danger for us, even though we fear them; we now possess firearms that we use to snipe animals from long-distances without them even seeing us. We get strong to prove that we can lift things and protect against threats, even though we have heavy-machinery forklifts and high-powered firearms that can kill anything with ease. We have pushed animals out of their natural habitats, trapping them in zoos, research centers, farms, and suburban houses. Why would we still fear animals? We are the single most invasive, dominant, and dangerous species on this planet. Any weakness we have biologically has been counteracted by our own things we have created.

Why do you think people are so overweight nowadays? It's a combination of eating as much food as possible, and driving everywhere. Eating as much food as possible is an extremely normal human behavior, as food was in such short supply back in hunter-gatherer times, so we would eat as much as humanly possible, because we wouldn't know when our next meal would come. That's why fat specifically exists; as an energy source for our bodies to feed off of when we don't have access to food. Nowadays, we get abundances of food consistently on a daily basis, whether it be through our consistent paychecks or our free food stamps. No longer do we have to rely on the kings of olden to give us food, and no longer do we have to rely on the luck of our environment to provide us with food; we can now drive down to our local supermarket and have a paradise of abundant food whenever we want. No longer do we have to walk dozens of miles all day to get to our next destination (in the process, strengthening our bodies), as we can now get in a car, and drive over to our destination within 15 minutes, all while only moving our foot up and down every once in a while. Hunter-gatherers of old never had to consciously 'go out on a walk' and 'weightlift'; that just entailed everyday life. They had to lift heavy objects constantly, and walk for dozens of miles to get anything. Hunter-gatherers never had to 'watch their diet'; every meal was cherished and important, and additionally, every meal they got was not chemically processed by a mega-corporation's manufacturing plant, so anything they could put in their gullets was fair game. Nowadays, we check our calorie count, check our ingredients to make sure they are safe, and have dedicated devices, technologies, and methods specifically designed to combat our natural instincts.

We live lives online, where we make strong friends with random strangers that will never assist us in real life, all the while feeling less lonely playing with them regardless. We gather friend upon friend upon friend, despite the fact that it really is not going to do anything for us. Going to that party will not increase our chances of survival. The only way I could possibly see human relationships as being beneficial and advantageous is through having a reproductive partner, but even then, we have sex pretty much only for fun. We have sex with condoms on. We have oral sex, anal sex, masturbation, fetishes that have absolutely nothing to do involving a vagina, and we have gay and even asexual people. Does this serve a reproductive purpose? Of course not. What the hell is the purpose of it, then? Why do we lust after it so much, if it serves us no purpose? Even then, in the chance that we do reproduce, what would it even matter? Our species is the most dominant species on Earth; our biology telling us to reproduce is because we are terrified to go extinct, but at that point, will that ever happen, considering the sheer amount of people we have on this planet? The Earth has grown with over a billion more people added to the world population since I was born in 2003. Why are we still so terrified not to have children, and to be sexless? Why do we waste so much time on getting these things when they are ultimately useless to us?

Why do we fear what other people think about us? Getting 'socially outed', or, at least experiencing the true, original repercussions of it, is impossible now, unless you go to prison, and even then, your basic survival needs are maintained. Our 'punishment' is no longer a real punishment. When we commit a socially atrocious crime, we are not booted off into the jungle to fight on our own, left to die, but rather we are sent to a confined place where literally all of our needs are taken care of, almost completely for free. Think about all the people, especially homeless people, who commit crimes on purpose just to get back into prison. And yet we still have social anxiety, and self-consciousness, and worry way too much about what that other person is going to say about us if we do something socially 'unacceptable'. In our eyes, we don't do it because we know exactly what is going to happen; they will reject us, and leave us alone. In hunter-gatherer times, this was a death sentence; not having the approval and guidance of other humans would mean you would be left to die alone in the jungle. Nowadays, if you don't have the approval and guidance of other humans, you just live your life as normal; you go back to your normal apartment with all of your basic needs met. While you might not have the respect of individual humans, you will always have the respect of your faceless employer and your even more faceless government, who provides things based off of pure logical principle and rule, rather than emotional opinion. There are essentially zero real repercussions for social mishaps, with the exception of prison, but even then, your basic needs are still met (with the obvious oversight being that you are locked up and cannot explore new territory, which also, is completely meaningless, as humans have explored the entire world already). Why do we still feel so terrified of all these things, when they serve absolutely no threat to us?

It's because we live in a million-year-old brain, in a world that is too advanced for us. We got ahead of ourselves. Our whole world is a hack and glitch of our biology, where just about everything about us has been exploited. At the end of the day, we are literally just apes; dumb animals that have a little bit of consciousness, but still have instincts at the end of the day. We are just slaves to our own dumb biology, and it's becoming impossible to satisfy some of our nowadays unnecessary) biological needs, because our world has been constructed in such a way that these needs are impossible to get for the right reasons. Having friends no longer involves sharing resources and providing safety. Getting resources is not dependent on our gritty survival skills with tools, but is instead dependent on complete random luck from an employer in a job interview, telling you to push buttons over and over again in the same place every day. Sex is no longer an act of reproduction, but of recreation. Shelter no longer needs to be constructed by us, but can instead just be bought off of Zillow now. We no longer trade and barter with resources that will genuinely benefit our survival, but instead exchange a literal fake, meaningless, made-up currency; the 'dollar', the 'ruble', the 'pound', the 'euro', the 'yen', the 'coin', the whatever, and we loan things from faceless governments with made-up currencies. Getting stronger and being fit is useless, as we have firearms and cars to get us places; the skinny stick-guy like me who can't lift anything is perceived as useless, because that's our natural biological instinct, but he is just as capable of wielding a firearm, driving a car, and operating a forklift as any other buff dude out there, which is really what matters.

It's so funny too, because you can even see humans trying to REGRESS in their biology, despite the progress we have made. Would hunter-gatherers have ever had to dedicate time to go 'camping'? Would they have ever gone out to boat and fish 'for fun'? No, because they lived in an environment where that was commonplace and necessary for survival. Nowadays, we subconsciously think the same thing, but chase after it directly; going camping connects us to our 'real needs', even though we're much safer in a cookie-cutter suburban house and neighborhood.

The dilemma of modern humans, I think, is of being in this limbo of living in an environment that is not made for them, but is still technically suitable for survival. Our dilemma is either choosing to figure out ways to connect ourselves back to our now useless instincts, or to abandon those instincts entirely and not care about them anymore, as they are now useless.

Will we see an evolution of the human, where we no longer feel depressed living in loneliness and the suburbs, despite the fact that it is meaningless for our survival, and in fact, advantageous for it? Will social validation, and the entire social sphere as a whole, become entirely meaningless? Will food and diets become meaningless? Will becoming stronger become meaningless? Will exercise become meaningless? Plenty of asocial, solitary, and inactive species that do not eat anything or reproduce exist out there; is that the next evolution of the human? Evolutionary changes happen over millions of years, and humans have changed so rapidly in simply just 200 years. Is this the next step for evolution? Are we living in the next step, slowly watching ourselves become unadaptable to our environment, preparing ourselves for when we are weeded out and no longer to adapt at all?