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, it's rare to see someone 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 food was scarce. Today, food is abundant and sex is scarce. Yesterday we had many children 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.
Our minds are adapted to the World of Yesterday. That's not the same as saying we were ever at peace. The mind was not, and is not, in the business of peace. The mind is in the business of persuasion. It has its own priorities.
For a long time, the mind's operating system was in sync enough with the outside world that its desires made sense. These desires provoked an action to achieved one of the mind's goals. A sex drive provoked sex which resulted in families. A sweet tooth prompted gathering food which led to health and strength. The desire for information gave us accurate predictions, which led to safety and power over nature.
But because we were never at peace, we tweaked things. The World of Today is like a love letter to desire. We created contraception, severing the link between sex and reproduction, so that we could do it as much as we wanted. Then we invented pornography so we could do it by ourselves. When sex is watched on a 3 inch screen, the craving serves no purpose -- only to extinguish itself. We grew and harvested so much food that we invented drugs to get people to stop eating it. For an obese person, what purpose does hunger serve, apart from extinguishing itself. Screens gave us access to all the information in the world. Most of that information is irrelevant to us. The desire for it remains just as before, and for many of us just exists just to extinguish itself.
How confusing this all is. Because in trying to make the world more suitable for itself, it created a world full of cravings that don't suit the world. And this is just a result of giving the mind what it asked for. We reshaped everything because our minds found problems in everything, and were convinced that they knew best.
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, and is maybe less like soothing our restless minds, and more like scratching an itch until it bleeds.