Well crafted response Shadyj! I’m in my 70’s and retired from a lifelong career in the military. A career that had me deployed in combat environments overseas where other people, I had never met, were trying to kill me daily with incoming artillery rounds and sniper fire. It shreds away your unnecessary worry about trivial 1st world possessions and social events. Instead, you focus on survival and the love of your nuclear family back home. Everything else just doesn’t even make it into your concious or subconscious thoughts. I can to this very day vividly remember the smell of cordite, human blood and death that lingers after your friends die around you.
It was during one of those artillery barrages that I had an epiphany—we really as a species have not evolved to handle the “information age” or a more civilized behavior. There is really no evolutionary pressure other than “survival of the fittest.” By that I mean kill or be killed, if you will. Is reading social media really going to cause us to evolve? Human behavior has always had the massive rudimentary building block of the ancestral mind. That ancestral mind is expecting us to live in small clans separated by vast amounts of land and to worry about having our spouses, children, food and land raided, killed and stolen by outsiders. Hence why we only pay attention to “bad news” or potential threats from bad news. Ancestral humans and now us, their decendents, continue to have this imprinted primal behavior. We should expect it and prepare for it—always. There are philosophers who question why we never learn from our past societal mistakes. Well, learning on a societal basis requires some mutual evolutionary advantage for our decendents of different cultures. As long as humans continue to spawn leaders like Putin we will be kept trapped by our ancestral minds. That said, as Shadyj so aptly wrote above, we are capable of other pursuits that inspire us as a species.
