It's a new world. It's the same constitution.
— Chief Justice John Roberts
The mind straddles two worlds. The World of Yesterday, and the World of Today.
Until Yesterday, you rarely saw anyone once. Today, most people you see you won't see twice. Yesterday, there might have been fifty people in your tribe. Today, there might be 50,000 in your neighborhood.
These two worlds are not just different in size. They present different problems. In Yesterday's World, sex was abundant and food was scarce. Today, food is abundant and sex is scarce. Yesterday we had lots of kids but most died young. Today we have fewer but most survive. Yesterday leisure was abundant but comforts were scarce. Today it's reversed. And so on.
The mind is adapted to the problems of the World of Yesterday. That's not the same as saying it was at peace. The mind was not, and is not, in the business of peace. The mind is in the business of persuasion, and it biases us toward actions when those actions serve its purposes.
For most of history, its operating system was at least in sync enough with the outside world that those actions make sense. Evolution figured out that to ensure reproduction, all that's needed is a desire for sex, and rest takes care of itself. To ensure health, all that's needed is a desire for taste. To ensure harmony in groups and solve complex problems, the desire to share, to find agreement, to be listened to.
But gradually, and perhaps subconsciously, man figured out how to satisfy those desires more directly.
To satisfy the sex drive we created contraception, severing the link between pleasure and reproduction. Then we created pornography, severing the link even between each other. The arousal is similar, and the desire is similar, when sex is viewed through a phone screen. But what purpose does it serve at that point? Nothing, other than to extinguish itself.
We created artificial sweeteners and put them in soft drinks, divorcing the sense of taste from the information it gave us. Then we refined sugar and put it in everything. In pursuit of taste, we created obesity and addiction. We had to mass-retrofit diabetes drugs into weight-loss pills to stop people from overeating, because the desire to eat stopped being about satiety and became a means to extinguishing itself.
In screens we created are little doors to the whole rest of the world. In pursuit of information, we scroll. In pursuit of connection, we post. Most of this information is irrelevant to us, and most of the people who interact with us online are people we'll never meet. You can satisfy the need to be around others without ever leaving home. The desire exists just the same, but now only to extinguish itself. Stranger still, we've discovered that we can get many of our emotional needs met by graphics cards in warehouses in Utah. At that point, what does the desire for emotional connection serve? Nothing but to extinguish itself.
This is a result of giving the mind what it asked for. We reshaped everything because our minds found problems in everything. How confusing this all is. The more the mind makes the world suitable for itself, the less its desires suit the world.
The question, of course, is where this road ultimately leads. Because it sure has begun to seem like human progress has little to do with human happiness -- maybe less like soothing our restless minds, and more like scratching an itch until it bleeds.