Evolved Discontent

Disclaimer: these are the written extension of a rambling series of conversations (which may or may not have happened alongside some yeasty beverages). As such, this is not well researched nor integrated into broader theories of evolutionary psychology.

Ever wonder what bananas looked like before domestication and selective breeding?

It is no secret that we live in a world that no longer resembles the evolutionary pressures that sculpted the anatomy and physiology we have inherited from our ancestors. However, I think that we are only now coming to realise the potent effects of living in a post-industrial world that we didn’t evolve to be in. The technological revolution has transformed our environments into a state unimaginable even half a century ago.

Whilst the internet is an obvious example from a technological perspective, perhaps the most pertinent example to make this line of reasoning clear is food. For the majority of human history food was a bland necessity. Even the fruits that you might expect to have offered a sweet snack to your great, great, great (insert quite a few more ‘greats’ here) grandfather had yet to have been selectively bred for size and sweetness. Procuring enough food to survive occupied a majority of our ancestors time and efforts. This scarcity and struggle drove us to evolve to deeply crave and enjoy sweet and fatty foods for their caloric density.

Today, we have foods that are drastically more calorie dense in far greater abundance than our ancestors could ever have imagined. As such, we have a mismatch between the food environment we exist within and the food environment our brains evolved in. The result is a global obesity epidemic driven by food overindulgence that has caused untold harm to individuals, healthcare systems, and economies.

So what does any of this have to do with discontent? I’m getting there, but bear with me for one more meandering foundational point.

We evolved in an environment of problems. Is that animal going to kill me? Is that person going to kill me? Is the lack of food going to kill me? Is the lack of water going to kill me? Is the weather going to kill me? You may be noticing a trend here; for brevity, the world was a desperately hostile place.

When there are constant challenges there is a strong evolutionary drive for one to problem solve. This is central to the facets of cognition collectively known as motivation. Our brains have evolved to make us desire progress towards dealing with those pesky environmental hostilities. Do we have a little bit more adiposity (chub) than we did yesterday? Progress. Did we manage to make a new club to help fight against that other angry hominid who lives in the cave next door? Progress. Did we befriend a canine that will one day become mans best friend? Progress.

Motivation drives us to do things and doing things is key to progress. If one isn’t motivated to engage in survival promoting activities they become less likely to pass on their genes. Today, we might refer to this as something like “anhedonia” - a lack of pleasure derived from activities that are normally pleasurable. Behaviourally, this manifests as someone who is unmotivated. If you don’t derive pleasure from such activities why would you engage in them?

Evolutionarily, anhedonia was bad and thus motivation, being anhedonia’s rough opposite, was good. As Jeremy Bentham famously put it, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.” Pleasure exists because it motivates us to undertake survival promoting activities. So now we are finally ready to get to contentedness; or rather, an evolutionarily driven lack thereof.

Someone who is content is in a state of peaceful happiness. Is that person motivated to pursue progress? Not particularly. In fact, someone in a true state of contentedness is behaviourally highly similar to someone experiencing the aforementioned anhedonia. Being content is impossible when food is scarce or club wielding neighbours exist and, for our ancestors, these challenges were ever-present. The unfortunate reality is that their circumstances were likely never good enough to allow for true content.

As such, evolutionary processes are disinclined to allow a contented state within human cognition as, behaviourally, this would result in some level of reduced motivation. Genuine and lasting contentedness simply doesn’t offer evolutionary utility; if you are happy with what you have why would you be driven to improve it?

Our evolutionary pressures have instilled upon us a desire to progress. However, the way this translates to our modern world is complex. For the most part, those of us in the western world are lucky enough to no longer have the significant risk of being mauled by a wild animal nor starvation. In many ways, the pressures that necessitated our motivation to improve have diminished or been removed.

As such, we now have the unfathomable privilege of not only wanting to live our lives, but also have the time and resources to think about doing so happily. Unfortunately, the same brains that now desire contentedness so desperately seem to be evolutionary inherently limited in their ability to be so.

How often do you find yourself “living in the the future”. Living for the weekend. Or for the next holiday. What about telling yourself that the new car, or clothes, or partner will make you happy? We so often live for “the next thing” - not because we are ungrateful, mentally weak, or unintelligent - but rather our brains have not evolved to do otherwise.

That sense of progress is what allowed our ancestors to constantly push to survive, reproduce, and develop humankind into the bafflingly dominant species we are today. However, in doing so, we have been left ironically poorly evolved to live in the environment we have created.