Modern Culture is Just Three Days Deep // Variant Perception #31
Hey Friends!
Jared here. Thank you so much for reading Variant Perception, which is the outcome of what’s always been a deep desire of mine to create. I’ve been focusing more time and effort on creating unique and valuable content each week and sending it to you. It would mean the world to me if you shared this content with your friends and family using the button below. My goal with this newsletter and for my writing is to help create a more informed perspective on an increasingly complex world, which I feel is needed more than ever. Sharing this content with your friends helps to motivate me to keep doing what I’m doing.
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I get a little tripped out when I think too much about how we are the same humans that existed ~250,000 years ago. Can you imagine living in a tribe of ~100-150 people and hunting wooly mammoths? Or keeping watch around the fire, under the most beautiful stars you can’t even imagine today (damn light pollution!), looking out for predators who hunt at night? Can you even imagine not having written language?
It feels like those people we all directly descended from must’ve been more different than who we are today. Except, it’s more likely that they’re not. The Smithsonian Magazine said this, “For instance, artifacts recovered over the past decade in South Africa— such as pigments made from red ochre, perforated shell beads and ostrich shells engraved with geometric designs—have pushed back the origins of symbolic thinking to more than 70,000 years ago, and in some cases, to as early as 164,000 years ago. Now many anthropologists agree that modern cognition was probably in place when Homo sapiens emerged.”
Modernity has taken us far from our natural state, the environment where homo sapiens evolved. We’re so far removed that it feels as if the lives our far ancestors lived could’ve never been our reality. There was never a reality where my ancestors didn’t have writing and language or laws and government.
Thinking through what that life would’ve been like feels incredibly foreign. I really can’t imagine it. Except that’s how it was for the large majority of our species’ existence! Now, I’m not advocating I’d like to go back to that way of life (how could I ever make an informed decision around that!). However, I find it valuable and necessary to look at how our default evolutionary programs fail us in the context of modern life, which (being generous) has spanned 4% of our existence.
The random Yahtzee roll of life brought us into a highly unnatural state. And in many ways, the modern world has become hostile to human health and happiness. The world we’ve found ourselves in is so different than the world we evolved in that our biological adaptions have not caught up to the world we live in. Much of the time, they actively work against us.
The effect of social media is a perfect example of how our subconscious world (primitive programming) can get hijacked by a modern phenomenon. Nothing of this scale has ever existed in the human experience. Social media is a cheap, easy dopamine factory for the human mind. It’s accessible, follows us everywhere, and preys on many of our weakest unconscious biases.
One of the primitive programs that gets hijacked by social media is called the affect heuristic. It states that humans believe whatever creates strong emotions is accurate and correct. Allowing emotion to dictate decision-making and judgment skills leaves us open to making poorly-informed decisions that don’t accurately represent reality.
For instance, a person who holds a positive emotional association with electric cars (because of media they’ve consumed or how excited their friend was to get a new Tesla) might automatically judge them to be safer, more environmentally friendly, or more economical, despite not having thorough, objective knowledge about electric vehicles.
Or, take this tweet (or X now…) I found. It’s a perfect example of how the affect heuristic influences inaccurate perspectives.
It’s doctored, but that doesn’t matter because highly emotion-inducing content warps our sense of both conscious (what we’re aware of) and subconscious (which we’re unaware of) reality. Trump is the ultimate purveyor of the affect heuristic. He evokes emotion like a rockstar, but much of it is smoke and mirrors.
Social media creates a dangerous playground for the affect heuristic to influence its users. The constant barrage of information and images (as I call ‘Machine Gun Data’) elicits strong emotional responses that dictate our unconscious perspective on reality.
For example, I follow homesteading accounts on social media and get a lot of joy from them. I enjoy seeing the families growing their food, caring for animals, and problem-solving on their land. The content paints a rosy, idyllic picture of what it’s like to be a homesteader. It’s all beautiful sunsets, cute moments, and bountiful harvests.
Except, I can all but guarantee these homesteaders I follow have bad days. Their zucchini plant (or whatever) died, their donkey gets sick and diarrheas everywhere, or their kids are kicking and screaming because they don’t want to milk the cow anymore. Of course, none of that makes its way to social media (they have a brand to maintain!), influencing me and my perception of what it’s like to be a homesteader.
The positivity their account paints and the pleasant emotions I feel when I consume the content create an imperfect judgment in my mind that homesteading = fun, beautiful, and pristine. In reality, however, I know that it also involves a shitload (technical term) of hard work, moments of frustration, and difficult choices such as all paths in life.
Replace homesteading with any interest you regularly consume content on, and you can begin tracking how your perspectives can get warped. It creates a ‘grass is greener on the other side’ momentum of certain perspectives, and we end up with a view of reality that’s half-formed and highly influenced by curated content created to evoke strong feelings.
This happens daily, even if you’re not active on social media. It happens when we’re talking with friends. It happens when we’re buying groceries. We’re all subject to making imperfect judgments based on our emotional perception of reality.
There’s a quote I love attributed to indigenous culture that states, “Modern culture is just three days deep.”
The idea is that when a modern human goes into their natural place, deep in nature, no phone, no technology, it takes around three days for the stink of modern culture to wash off.
This quote speaks to our half-formed perspectives on reality. The over-abundance of information and content creates much more noise than signal. The human mind gets hijacked by the content, and because the content that gets shared the most evokes the most emotion, our perspective also gets hijacked by all of the noise.
We end up caring about the things that don’t matter.
What our culture “cares” about, the news clips that get the most attention and get us all fired up, and the short-form videos of a dog pressing buttons to speak to its owner don’t matter when you enter a natural state.
Natural Place = Natural State
When placed back into their natural place (the place we evolved in for hundreds of thousands of years as homo sapiens and millions of years as our ancestors), the human being goes back to their natural state.
And by the fourth day, as the saying goes, the virtue signaling disappears, the value comparison stops, and the phone compulsion quiets.
From that place, depth emerges. Depth and knowledge of ourselves, our natural selves, arises, and we discover who we are when all modern cultural influences and inputs disappear.
I've felt glimpses of this whenever I go backpacking. Being that deep in nature, with no media inputs, no awareness of the latest crisis to support, or the latest outrage to appease, I felt my most natural self.
I felt a depth in myself that I rarely think about while typing on my computer, driving my car, or zooming in with my team.
So, I'll leave you, Dear Reader, with this.
How do we develop a culture that's as deep as the ocean, as compassionate as a loving mother, as encouraging as a thoughtful father, and as beautiful as Mother Nature?
I don't know the answer to that question... yet. It may take a lifetime of exploration to figure that out. But, I do desire to increase the depth of the culture I pass on to my children.
P.S. The quote I heard from Boyd Varty on the Tim Ferris Show.
Boyd is a unique and interesting human being; his story is inspiring and awe-inducing. His book, A Lion Tracker's Guide to Life, is one of my favorites.