When you live right in the middle of a modern city/community its hard to not to get distracted. Humans are designed to be observant especially of interesting out of the ordinary things. This survival trait was very helpful in ages past. It allowed us to pick out things in our environment that could have been beneficial like food, shelter, special healing herbs. It also allowed us to spot things that were dangerous like predators, poisonous things, bad weather etc.. However needing to be on the look out for food is long behind us and all of our ancient predators are either extinct or now reside at the zoo. Survival it seems has been redefined, in fact by us even. By getting so good at killing things and growing “food” we over the years have given ourselves a lot of extra time to think about… “ourselves”. This meta-thinking has given rise to lots of ideas, concepts and cultural changes. Slowly as the years trickled by, we moved further and further away from the daily grind of trying to survive, to just the daily grind.
Compare in your head the amount of time and energy it would have taken your ancestors through different periods of time to find enough food each day, week, month and year to survive. Think about before agriculture was around. You had to find your food! Have you ever walked out of your house with the idea in your head, that today you needed to find your food to live. Most people in a modern society would probably answer no. I also know that most of these people today would starve if they had too. Think about how amazing these ancient people were to achieve enough success, day in and day out for 1000’s years. Everyday, week, month and year they went out and got the job done. If they hadn’t, you/we wouldn’t be here. These humans were focused on one thing above all else all the time, survival. Thats pretty much all they had to do. Just make sure you live until tomorrow, avoid the sabertooth’s, find the food, sleep out of the rain and then procreate. Distractions back then were unusal noises, strange colored plants or new animals etc.. How many new things must have popped up for these people, living as close to nature as they did. My guess is these people knew their surroundings well and weren’t discovering new things everyday. Most of the animals, plants and scenery would be familiar and understood, the fact that we’re here today is proof that these people new what was going on around them. Again the focus of these people had to be amazing and necessary for survival. One lapse in concentration could have meant death at anytime any day. This state of focus and concentration had to have influenced the evolution of our thinking and nervous system, giving rise to advancements in thought.
Studies show that people who purposefully focus on learning how to do something better will achieve better results faster than people who do the same thing, but don’t really care as much. It can be anything, exercising, drawing, singing, cooking, math etc.. I don’t need to site studies for you to understand this. Everyone knows if you really want to become better at something you need to do it a lot, which requires thinking and concentrating on doing what we all call practice. Practice makes perfect right. Well practice does something else, it actually requires the activity of your body to make whatever your doing, easier to perform. If it’s running, well then the nervous system develops more neural networks and thicker neurons that deal with that particular movement. This increases the speed and efficiency of the signals, thus making the movement easier and less expensive energetically. Not only that, this rewiring also prompts and responds to stimulus from the muscle tissue to repair the damaged tissue and this time make it stronger. This same format is followed for something like learning engineering or selling products.
What is remarkable and important is that intention and concentration, actually drive results. It’s not enough to do something to become better at it, you have to also want to become better at it.
Back to our ancestors, this is why they became so good at survival. They directed most of their attention to it because their lives literally depended on being excellent at finding food, avoiding predators and danger etc.. This drove evolution in their ability to do so which also stimulated their nervous systems (brain) to develop, new ways of looking at the same problem. This brings us more advancements in survival techniques and increases succeeding at survival. Food became more readily available, communities larger because of population growth and threat of predators went down. Human packs
“tribes” were bigger, animals avoided them more. You can continue the trend up till now, which is what brings me to distraction as a modern ailment.
The better we became at survival the less time we obviously needed to spend working on it. So we started working on other problems and ideas. Better shelter, better tools, better weapons, essentials to survival, not as much time spent finding food and avoiding predators. Once these were developed further, we had more time to think about ourselves and life. Culture starts to develop, music, art, laws are developed and so on. All of these developments have a foundation in improving our survival chances. Looking back through history, I would view them as being successful, after all we are still here and have 7 billion people on this earth. Even so surviving up till about 150 years ago was still very hard work.
Most everything still had to be done by hand and food took a ton of energy to grow. Working the land, watering, managing, harvesting and saving seeds. Think of the logistics of all of that and being done without the aid of machines. If there were machines they were crude and energy was not abundant. The struggle to survive was still a persons main focus, most of your time was devoted to it. People kept busy working long hours at their jobs and then went home to their families. For many that is all life was, work and family. Privileged humans were able to go to special schools, parties, follow their inspirations, dreams etc.. While the majority just needed to work to survive, day to day, week to week.
This may sound depressing but I don’t think it is. When studying primitive cultures researchers have pointed out that most of these societies are overall more happy or fulfilled than us in a more contemporary society. Not only that, they are usually healthier as well. Maybe it has something to do with living and working closer together, sharing each other lives. Maybe that actively participating in a more direct responsibility to ones immediate survival, affects something in our genes. I feel that this more direct approach to responsibility for daily survival is very important. It’s all about the focus and attention of ones thoughts and abilities. This responsibility for making sure one survives on a day to day basis keeps the mind sharp and the body stronger. Which in turn strengthens the ability to think and reason. Read the book SPARK if you want to get tons of info about how all these things relate to each other. This having to survive through harsh conditions turned us into the alpha mammals on this planet. Which begs the question, so now what do we do with this power, position and freedom? We distract ourselves.
Having to survive has no relation to what it used to mean. We still need food and shelter. These aspects of living, are for most everyone, not very hard to come by. Thanks to corporations and humans basic instinct for pleasure we have millions of super cheap, easy to come by foods. Whether this “food” is nutritious doesn’t matter, if you eat it you will survive. Shelter is also easier to come by. No person has to build their own home anymore, just get some semblance of a job, another friend or partner and stare the cost of renting a cheap apartment. With these two main survival priorities basically guaranteed, what happens next. Remember alot of humans time was spent trying to survive on a daily basis. It still required tremendous work even a 150 years ago. It seems the result is alot of free time to think of stuff to keep us busy.
Our brains are super powerful and complex. For 99% of our history our brains have been preoccupied with processing the daily survival scenario. With that huge amount of time and energy now freed up, what is this incredible organ and system going to do. It automatically will start adapting to the change and figuring out what the new parameters for survival are.
Essentially this is what has been happening all along, only for all of our history change took place very, very slowly. Our nervous system was allowed to make changes slowly over time. The last 100 years or 50 or 25, no wait 12.5, actually the last 6.25, (well you get the picture) has seen more advancements in technology and culture then pretty much our whole history. Exponential growth has a been occurring in tech since the 1960’s. With processing speed doubling every 10 years in the same time frame. this type of growth has never happened before in recorded history. What does this mean for our ability to think and live? All of these advancements have made most everything much easier to do, more quickly happen and usually at much less expense to produce or acquire. What has this dramatic shift done to us?…
My observations can be described with a couple of points.
- Cultural shifts and ideas are following the same pattern as tech growth. These shifts and ideas are also subject to the same instability and trend towards obsoleteness that tech follows. Nothing seems to be able to stand for long. No organic growth. Just placement of new structures and then innovation, destruction and replacement
- Everything is still based off surviving at the subconscious level. Because of these dramatic lifestyle changes and cultural shifts our brain is trying to keep up with all of it, but is unused to the pace of change. This could possibly be creating many of the 1st world problems we see today. Depression, suicide, violence, drug abuse. Also abstract changes in culture, were seen when white sugar was introduced to native peoples unaccustomed with it. (look up Weston Price,”Nutrition and physical Degeneration”)
- In the end we all want to belong. It’s an emotional trait we developed to help us get along with each other, to increase survival odds in our favor. So without thinking we adopt many or all of the newer trends or tech that comes along. Cell phones, fast food, trends, fads, political movements etc… Most of us do this without questioning too much. We do this up until adverse problems occur, very rarely before.
- Most of all these adopted things are just distractions, we use to fill our time and belong. We need to occupy our subconsciousness with things related to survival, if the distractions are sold with notion that they are essential to survival, then subconsciously we will feel the need to want them. However these distractions are always there and never stop entering our lives. There is a constant stream of information clogging up and occupying the space of our minds, confusing and terrifying are subconsciousness.
- The absence of these distractions brings about a rebalancing of thoughts, mood, functionality. Evidence for these positive benefits can be shown through the massive amount of study and research into what the affects of being in nature have on human beings. The same is true for meditations or going to a retreat, limiting TV, computer and cell phone use or all together. (Look up book “Your Brain on Nature”.
Wake up by putting your digital devices to sleep.
Thanks for reading.
Matthew.
DynamicEarthling.com 