Why are we born free and end up enslaved?
—NOAM CHOMSKY
IF WE DON’T NEED work to survive, what do we need? If constant work is not healthy for the human brain, what is healthy? What is the point, I wondered, of realizing that what I’m doing is bad for me if I don’t know for sure what is good? What I needed was a how-to guide for the care of a human being, just like the books you read when you get a new pet. What do I need in order to be happy and healthy? This new line of inquiry led me to one of the most contentious debates in evolutionary biology.
Nearly half a century ago, Noam Chomsky, the linguist, social critic, cognitive scientist, and philosopher, agreed to participate in a live debate on Dutch television. In what has since become a famous dialogue, he spent about ninety minutes sparring with the French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault.
The two men were attempting to answer one of the most enduring questions in all of human history, the question I had about myself and my colleagues: Is there a universal human nature? Are some things bad for all humans, like chocolate for dogs, or does it always depend on the person? Are there some traits and tendencies that are common to all of us, or are we entirely shaped by culture and family? It is the question at the heart of the nature-versus-nurture dispute, and it has yet to be decisively answered.
Chomsky is a scientist, one of the founders of the study of cognitive science, and it’s no surprise that he believes evolution and biology help to dictate our behavior. Foucault was fairly contemptuous of modern science, seeing it as just another method by which elites exert control over society. He rejected any suggestion that our behavior is tied to biology.
The Chomsky-Foucault debate veered fairly quickly into political territory and issues of war and oppression, but I want to stick with that question of evolution and human nature. Since that debate in 1971, we have learned much more about DNA and the workings of the mind.
The question of nature versus nurture is still an open one, but we do know that Chomsky was more right than Foucault. While we can’t explain all human behavior as a product of biology, we can explain some of it. As Chomsky said almost fifty years ago, “There is something biologically given, unchangeable, a foundation for whatever it is that we do with our mental capacities.”
If, as I believe, our current work habits are stripping away our humanity and it is now imperative that we return to what is natural and healthy for our species, it’s essential that we first decide what that looks like. In other words, what is a natural environment for humankind? How much productivity is healthy, and at what point does the pursuit of productivity become toxic?
These are difficult but crucial questions. If some of our habits are harmful to us as a species, what do pro-human habits look like? It’s not always easy to distinguish between the two. What’s more, there are some who, like Foucault, reject the idea that biology determines our choices. Many of us struggle with the idea of a universal human nature. We understand that evolution helps to somewhat explain the behavior of dogs and chickens, but we refuse to apply that reasoning to humans. We are wedded to the idea of free will.
Keep in mind, very few people would argue that all our decisions and personality traits can be explained with a microscope. In the end, it’s not nature versus nurture, but nature and nurture. Some of what you do is biologically based, some is a choice, some is a combination of the two. Jeffrey Schloss, a professor of natural and behavioral sciences, says we should think of it “in terms of central tendencies, not inevitabilities.”
Schloss was writing for a curated discussion sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation on the topic “Does Evolution Explain Human Nature?” Nearly a dozen scientists and professors celebrated Charles Darwin’s two hundredth birthday by addressing this important question. The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson waxed poetic with his metaphor, saying humankind is like a musical instrument: the same basic nature but an infinite variety of songs.
Wilson is the author of Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives. He’s part of a growing number of evolutionary biologists and psychologists who believe understanding our biological roots can help us live better lives.
His view was helpful to me as I struggled to understand my own nature and how I might move away from stress and anxiety. For me, it means understanding what I truly need in order to be healthy and fulfilled, and what I can do without. This is crucial if we are to change how we work and how we play to bring increased well-being.
A word of caution, though: Our understanding of the human mind is based almost entirely on research studies, and those studies are often flawed and not representative of the whole diaspora of human life. A survey from 2008 showed that nearly all research subjects used for studies in the top psychology journals were Western, and almost 70 percent were from the United States.
That means we are drawing conclusions about all people in the world based on the responses of a tiny percentage of them. That doesn’t mean the research is unhelpful, of course, but that future investigation will be more comprehensive if it includes a diversity of people. Note that we are moving into some deep evolutionary waters. Stay with me for this, because it’s fascinating and will help you to understand your behavior in a much more profound way, the same way it helped me.
So let’s trace it back millions of years, to the moment when humans first split away from our chimpanzee ancestors. We don’t have to go through a complicated prehistory lesson here, but the broad strokes are these: We broke away from chimps in Africa about 4 million years ago and started walking on two legs. We started using stone tools shortly after that, but the first real human didn’t appear until about 2 million years ago, give or take a few hundred thousand years.
Homo sapiens didn’t show up for quite a while after that. There used to be a number of human species walking around on the planet, and ours is only about 300,000 years old. (In light of this book’s subject, it amused me to learn that the oldest fossils of our species were discovered lying alongside some stonework tools.) Our history is very short, in other words. Compare our 300,000 years to crocodiles, who’ve been around for 200 million.
Because 300,000 years is not many in evolutionary terms, it can be useful, in order to truly understand ourselves and our minds, to dig beyond the history of our own species and go back to our animal ancestors. Perhaps understanding what we have in common with our primate cousins and where we differ can lead to a better understanding of our own nature.
You may be surprised to learn just how similar we are to modern apes and chimps. Frans de Waal, one of the world’s foremost primatologists, points out, “Like us, they strive for power, enjoy sex, want security and affection, kill over territory, and value trust and cooperation. Yes, we use cell phones and fly airplanes, but our psychological make-up remains that of a social primate.”
We often think of our technological achievements as evidence of how much we differ from our chimp cousins, but really, our history with technology is only about 150,000 years old, a blip on the evolutionary timeline. That could mean that our current difficulties with technology are merely growing pains. Perhaps we simply haven’t learned how to share space with artificial intelligence yet and at least some of our issues are caused by tech advancing so much faster than evolution.
Obviously, there are differences between chimpanzees and us. We cook our food, for example, and have sex in private. We develop advanced languages as well, and that’s a very important distinction.
Apes and chimps are social creatures, like humans, but do not communicate using sophisticated language and vocabulary. Noam Chomsky points to this as evidence of a universal human nature: all humans use language, and people in two different parts of the world who have no interaction will create similar language structures.
Our natural abilities with language are also intertwined with the unique ways in which our minds work. Some biologists believe our use of language is part of the reason we are able to engage in abstract reasoning. In other words, humans may be distinguished by our ability to use scientific thinking and ask “Why?”
Perhaps we are able to think about abstract concepts like time and identity because we are able to articulate the ideas, using complicated vocabularies. We don’t have to learn simply by watching. Another human can quickly and efficiently explain how to use a hammer or how to drive a car. Language has allowed us to advance in ways that other species cannot.
It’s possible that our desire to pass our knowledge on to other humans is another distinguishing characteristic of our species. Language has been at the core of our success, and is perhaps the most important reason Homo sapiens is still around and the other human species are not. One person discovers which mushrooms are safe and which aren’t and shares that information with others, thus helping to protect the entire community.
Community is an important word in this context, and it’s the reason I’m focusing first on language, because our work habits have severely interfered with our ability to create communities. Language is essential and important because humans survive not alone but in groups.
Human beings are perhaps the best communicators on the planet. Conversation is our evolutionary heritage and our biological advantage. However, we evolved to share information using our voices and our ears, not using text. As of 1960, less than half of the world could read. In an incredibly short period of time, we’ve attempted to replace the most important platform for communication—speech—with a less advanced or efficient one—text.
The voice is an underappreciated and incredible instrument. It supplies us with data that we can get in no other way. Our ears evolved in ways that specifically help us listen better to other human voices, while our throats, mouths, and lips changed over time so that we could better speak. We evolved to talk to other humans and to hear them.
By the time a child is four to six months old, their parent can identify their cry and distinguish it from other children’s with nearly 100 percent accuracy. That’s how unique and expressive the human voice is. Have you ever gotten a call from a friend and only had to hear them say hi before you responded by asking, “What’s wrong?”
Instantly, you somehow sense that they’re upset, and that’s because we have evolved to pick up on minuscule emotional gradients in a voice. Brain research shows we detect information and begin processing it less than fifty milliseconds after someone else begins to speak, and a vast amount of the information we relay to each other is sent and received subconsciously. Since text is a conscious communication tool, we can’t express what the voice can because we’re not even aware of what’s missing.
It’s confusing to me that we seek to be more efficient by avoiding conversation, since vocalization is so incredibly powerful to our species and, in almost every case, more efficient than text. I’d imagine that part of the reason we are wasting our time at work and putting in long, unnecessary hours is that we are neglecting to use our voices. In replacing phone calls with email and texts, we are not taking advantage of our own evolutionary inheritance.
Michael Kraus at Yale University decided to test just how expressive the human voice is. For one of his experiments, he asked people to listen to recordings of others saying the same seven words, out of context. By simply hearing strangers say words like “yellow” and “thought,” participants were able to guess the speaker’s educational background and employment status quite accurately. “So people were accurate, at least minimally,” Kraus told WBUR, “with just hearing seven words people speak from all across the U.S.”
At this point, the average office worker sends and receives about 160 emails every day. There is conflicting information out there about how we choose to communicate on our smartphones, but the most generous estimate, from eMarketer, claims we spend about fifty-five minutes a day texting and the same amount of time on the phone. It’s probably no surprise that younger people spend significantly more time texting than talking, and I’m willing to bet most older people do as well.
However, voice-to-voice communication repeatedly outperforms text as more efficient and clear, so we are probably miscommunicating a lot by choosing the written word instead of the voice. And there is yet another important reason our love for texts and email is potentially problematic.
Research suggests it is our voice that humanizes us. A recent provocative study asked people to learn about others’ opinions using two forms: the written word and the spoken word. It turns out that when people read a differing opinion, whether it be online or in a newspaper, they are more likely to believe the other person disagrees because the other person is stupid and doesn’t understand the core concepts of the issue.
When we hear someone explain the same opinion in their own voice, we’re more likely to think they disagree because they have different perspectives and experiences. On a subconscious level, we make assumptions about the other person’s humanity based on the method they are using to communicate. If we’re reading a blog online, we tend to think of the author as less human than ourselves. Hearing someone’s voice helps us recognize them as human and therefore treat them in a humane way.
Your voice might go up in pitch when you’re excited; your speech might slow when you’re trying to be deliberate. Tiny changes in tone, rhythm, and breath, the study report says, “serve as a cue for the presence of an active mental life.” Text, the researchers concluded, doesn’t provide the same cues that point to a human mind behind the message. So the possibility that a reader might dehumanize the author goes way up.
It turns out, real human connection is powerful in a number of ways. For example, we know that negotiations that begin with a handshake are more likely to end successfully. Similarly, studies of brain activity show that face-to-face interaction is more likely to activate the part of the brain associated with mentalizing, or imagining the thoughts and emotions of another person. Mentalizing is the neural basis for empathy, and it’s an ability that scientists believe is fairly unique to humankind.
In a carefully controlled experiment, researchers found this effect when people believed they were listening to a live speaker instead of to a recording: The part of their brain associated with imagining the thoughts and needs of others was engaged. Translation: If you think you’re hearing someone speak to you, the part of your brain associated with empathy perks up, and you are more likely to feel compassionate toward that person.
This is a big part of why our overuse of email and texting is contributing to dehumanization and hatred: We simply need to hear each other’s voices. Yet I’ve found that people have a very hard time accepting this. Globally, we have come to believe that email is more efficient, more convenient, and just better than the phone. Our addiction to email is a symptom of our obsession with efficiency and productivity. Prying people away from email is sometimes harder than taking a bone from a terrier. So let me explain it in another way that might be more convincing: neural coupling.
In 2011, scientists at Princeton University set out to learn how the human brain interacts with other human brains while communicating. They had one student tell a story about a fiasco at her high school prom, and then they asked twelve other students to listen to a recording of the tale. As the students listened, they were hooked up to an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine.
The researchers discovered that the brain waves of the dozen people listening to the same story began to mirror those of the storyteller. When the listeners were engaged, their brain activity was almost synchronous with that of the person talking. To me, that’s such a mind-boggling result that if it hadn’t really happened, I might think it was a plot point in an episode of Star Trek.
This phenomenon is called speaker-listener neural coupling or, more simply, “mind meld.” Brain waves are essentially electrical impulses in the head. There’s no good explanation for how one person’s brain waves can mirror another person’s, but it happens when we listen closely. In some instances, the synchronization was so strong that the listener’s brain would anticipate changes in the speaker’s brain by a fraction of a second. That’s amazing stuff!
That kind of empathic bond cannot be duplicated by emojis. You receive information from the sound of a voice that cannot be transmitted in an email attachment. The email may feel more efficient and easier because you don’t have to deal with the other person when you’re writing it, but the efficiency is mostly an illusion.
I realized that my tendency to replace voice with text might be causing some of the stress and frustration I felt. This is a prime example of how understanding our essential nature can suggest tangible, practical advice: Humans communicate best through the voice, so cutting back on emails and texts will help reduce stress.
Our communication is the vehicle through which we form communities and collaborate on complicated tasks, even if someone is hearing impaired. Thus, this topic leads us directly to another essential human quality, one that is common to every member of our species: a need to belong.
If you were a zookeeper tasked with designing the perfect enclosure for your human animals, odds are you would never force them to live alone. We are a social species and we need each other. The primatologist Frans de Waal told me this: “Without a group, survival is hard, which is why belonging to a group is such a priority for all animals. They will do anything to fit in and not be ostracized, which is about as bad as getting killed.” To our animal brains, social isolation equates to increased risk of death.
This drive to be a member of a group or tribe, however, goes beyond simple defense strategy or strength in numbers. We will sometimes make choices that benefit others, even at our own expense, and we share this tendency, the tendency to be generous, with our closest animal relatives. In one experiment, researchers taught monkeys to pull a chain in order to get food. Then they changed the setup so that when a monkey pulled the chain, the machine gave the animal some food but also delivered an electric shock to another monkey.
Most of the monkeys stopped pulling the chain. Some starved themselves for several days rather than injure the monkey in the next cage. This instinct became stronger, the scientists found, when the monkeys had shared a cage at one point. If they didn’t know each other, they were a third less likely to forgo the food in order to protect the other. There was a natural inclination to protect their neighbors that became stronger as they grew closer. We share these protective tendencies with our simian cousins.
Humans also naturally form groups and communities and then place the needs of that community above almost all others. In a 1995 report, the psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary claimed that Freud was wrong: Sex is not the strongest need after survival. “Belongingness needs do not emerge until food, hunger, safety, and other basic needs are satisfied,” they wrote. “But they take precedence over esteem and self-actualization.”
In order for belongingness to be considered a fundamental need, a person would have to suffer some illness when the need is not met. That is true in this case. Lack of belonging and social isolation are quite devastating to the human mind and body. Research has shown that having a rich social life makes you less likely to get cancer or suffer a heart attack. People who belong to a community live longer, experience less stress, and are more likely to say their lives are meaningful.
Loneliness can lead to ill health and even death, and, as it turns out, the negative impacts of social isolation are tied back to our need to belong. That need is primal. Not only can it be disastrous when the need is not met, but it’s very beneficial when it is met. Consider an experiment conducted in 2005.
Forty-two married couples between the ages of twenty-two and seventy-seven were given small blister wounds on their arms. (I know. I’m also surprised at what people are willing to do in order to further scientific knowledge.) It turns out, the couples who admitted there was hostility in their marriages took nearly twice as long to heal as those with supportive partners. In other words, being part of a healthy marriage or partnership can help your body heal.
This phenomenon has been noted in many studies from all over the globe. Social contact (provided it’s not hostile) can reduce pain and strengthen the immune system. The surgeon and author Atul Gawande says, “Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic head injury.” That sounds like a fundamental need to me.
Belonging to a social group has helped our species almost from the first appearance of Homo sapiens on the planet. Not only does it keep us safer and allow us to collaborate in order to take down much larger animals, like buffalo and lions, but it also seems to have made us smarter. There’s good evidence that the rigors of dealing with other people (people can be tough to handle, right?) forced our brains to expand. Apes who belong to larger communities, for example, have larger brains than those who are more isolated.
The need to belong may have originated, many millions of years ago, as an efficient method to protect a species that was physically outmatched by many of its animal neighbors and by its human relatives like Neanderthals. Since then, this need has fundamentally changed our brains and our bodies so that we now can’t flourish without becoming a member of a healthy social group.
That doesn’t mean we have to like each other all the time in order to be healthy. Competition and argument are both natural within social groups. There is a line, though. If the competition goes too far, or the argument becomes aggressive, it can be harmful. Hostility is what determines the difference between healthy and not, so that interaction that is overwhelmingly angry or aggressive is probably not good for you.
Let’s bring this discussion back to practicality for a moment. Since belonging is a fundamental need, seeking out isolation is not good for you. And yet, more and more of us are avoiding other people and think it’s more efficient to work from home and order delivery of our meals, our groceries, our pet supplies, and anything else we can get without going to the store. Seeking out isolation may be at the heart of our rising stress. It is certainly not doing us any good.
Quality social interaction isn’t just good for you—it’s essential. The need to belong underlies many of our best impulses. It is probably what underlies empathy, for example, and empathy is a crucial component of human life.
Frans de Waal tells the story of a Russian scientist who was caring for a young chimpanzee. At one point, the chimp climbed onto the roof and the scientist couldn’t get him down. She tried calling to him and luring him with fresh fruit, but he wouldn’t budge. In the end, she pretended to hurt herself and then sat on the ground crying. At last, the chimp came down and embraced her, choosing to give up his perch only in order to console his friend. “The empathy of our closest evolutionary relatives exceeds even their desire for bananas,” de Waal writes.
Empathy in service of belonging may be the underpinning of our basic moral code. You’ll find a version of the golden rule in almost every major religion in history: Do unto others as you’d have them do to you.
Yet it requires a measure of empathy in order to do for others what we want for ourselves. It requires that we put ourselves in their place and wonder how they would want to be treated. “ ‘Love thy neighbor,’ interpreted from an evolutionary point of view,” writes the paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, “is an algorithm for social connectedness. The touted virtues of chastity, moderation, compassion, diligence, patience, moral commitment, and humility provide touchstones for effective group action.”
Darwin was confused by altruism. He couldn’t quite explain it from an evolutionary standpoint and ended up arguing that it must be transactional, that we give to others in the expectation that we’ll get something in return. That may be true in some cases, but I don’t think it fully explains human generosity and selflessness.
I believe empathy often motivates altruism. We see another person suffering and can imagine how painful it would be if our situations were reversed, and so we offer help. Empathy strengthens social bonds and helps to foster social inclusion, which makes it crucial in helping us fulfill our need to belong.
There’s good reason to believe that we are now pursuing strategies and habits that contribute to a decline in empathy, though we are not aware our habits are having that effect. For example, the medical community has been working for years to figure out why so many doctors and nurses lose empathy for their patients and where the decline begins. It turns out, the decline begins in medical school and may be the result of curriculum. In an effort to train professionals more efficiently, many schools now emphasize emotional detachment.
As a result, declines in empathy have been recorded during the first year of medical school, before clinical practice and before medical professionals have seen enough injury and death to become hardened to them. That suggests schools may be efficient at teaching physicians about anatomy and medical technology, but not effective in teaching them how to see their patients as human beings with complex inner perspectives and experiences.
Empathy is crucial for the survival of our species, and so it is almost universally innate in humans. Babies as young as seven months old can form empathic bonds with others. One study monitored babies’ brains as the children watched other people touching. Seeing a person touch the back of another’s hand activated the same area in the child’s brain, as though the child had felt a touch on his or her own hand. We are born, it seems, with the ability to form unspoken bonds with other humans.
If we lose that ability as adults, it’s because we are not exercising it enough or are participating in activities that cause its decline. Remember that our empathy is not stirred by emails and text messages as strongly as it is by hearing another voice. That makes it all the more important that we begin to construct workplaces that involve in-person and over-the-phone interactions, and that help meet our need to belong, without impinging on the social groups people have outside the office.
We’ll get into the specifics about how to address some of these issues later, though. Let’s get back to what we know about human nature and what it can teach us about what we need in order to maintain well-being. We need to hear voices, we need to belong, and we need to feel empathy for one another in order to banish hostility from our relationships. We also need rules.
If you’re thinking of early humans as primitive flower children who just did what they wanted all day, you may be surprised to discover that humans have a primal love for rules. We like structure and habits and routine. As the anthropologist Robin Fox says, “It’s the most basic feature of human nature. We’re the rule-making animal.”
We are tribal, of course, but also territorial. We like to create guidelines for who is a member of the tribe and who isn’t, where we live and where we don’t. Just about every society in history has placed restrictions on when one human can take the life of another, for example. Sometimes those restrictions are included in the larger message of a spiritual practice, sometimes they aren’t, but they’re always created and enforced.
It certainly makes sense that a species that survives through cooperation would need rules in order to govern behavior. Good fences, in this sense, really do make good neighbors. The impulse to follow the rules is deeply embedded in our psyches, and that’s mostly a good thing.
Having rules allows us to coexist in peace. One scientist pointed out to me that apes would never be able to gather with other unknown apes simply for the purpose of entertainment. “Chimps,” Frans de Waal says, “would fight.” Yet we regularly gather by the thousands for concerts and parades, and we get along because we sit in our assigned seats and stand behind the yellow lines and stop talking when the music starts. We get along because we know and follow the rules. We have centuries of evolution urging us to follow social norms. Some people resist that urge, but most don’t.
So that’s another basic need for humans that, so far as we know, is universal: rules. This is clearly practical knowledge, since it means that it is both natural and healthy to establish boundaries and limits and to create structures. There are two last behaviors that appear to be common to all members of our species, across geography and history: music and play.
The earliest musical instrument was almost certainly the human voice, accompanied by slapping the knees or stamping the feet, but scientists have discovered flutes made of ivory and bone that date back more than 42,000 years.
Music probably serves an important evolutionary purpose. Many researchers believe music helped Homo sapiens get the upper hand against Neanderthals. Because it is so effective at building communities and strengthening empathy, music was probably instrumental (pardon the pun) in creating broad social networks and relaying information. Believe me, I’m not just saying this because I’m a musician. I’m biased, but that doesn’t make it less true.
Play serves an important function as well, which is likely why it’s common to all human cultures. Of course, anyone who’s spent time around a dog or watched squirrels for any length of time knows we’re not the only ones who play. Just as wrestling dogs are honing their coordination, balance, and athletic abilities, so are small humans while playing tag.
Play helps us develop socially, physically, and cognitively. It can also teach us how to handle unexpected events. Playing games teaches young children about social rules and establishes bonds within a community. It helps us create trust and manage stress. The ecologist Marc Bekoff, who worked with Jane Goodall, says that when we are playing, “we are most fully human.”
Many other things, like work, have been described as inherent human needs, but these I’ve listed are the only ones that seem to be consistent across cultures and across generations. These are the essential qualities of a human being: social skills and language, a need to belong that fosters empathy, rule-making, music, and play. We excel at these things, and we need them in order to be healthy.
I compared that list with my current work habits and it became immediately clear that I was not creating an environment or a schedule that allowed space for those activities. The only one I seemed to be enthusiastic about was rule-making. I make all kinds of rules for myself, like waking up early and going to the gym and tweeting enough to grow my brand. There was nothing in the schedule related to music or play or increasing my empathy.
Remember, evolution simply cannot fully explain our behavior. One of the enduring mysteries is why we consistently choose to do things that hurt us and hurt our communities, not unknowingly like a dog eating chocolate with no understanding of the consequences, but with full knowledge, as when we smoke cigarettes. We do bad stuff, and we know it’s bad. I can’t explain why.
One definition of goodness is something that helps our species survive and thrive. I think one of the strongest arguments that biology doesn’t explain all of human nature is our irrationality. We do things that are not good for us. Regularly.
One of the most dangerous examples of this is our tendency to deny our need to belong by isolating ourselves from authentic human contact. Current teenagers are spending significantly less time with friends than teens in the twentieth century. My generation, Gen X, hung out with friends for about an hour longer than current high school seniors do.
We have already received warnings that this trend is connected to a rise in loneliness and depression. The alarm started going off years ago and the problem is expected to reach epidemic proportions within a decade or so. We have mostly ignored that warning and leaned in to the habits that are isolating us and making us sick.
We are like a patient who’s diagnosed with lung cancer but decides to increase the number of cigarettes they smoke. Yes, it’s that dire. Loneliness and social isolation increase a person’s risk of death by 25 to 30 percent. We have a fundamental need to belong, a hunger for community, and we are choosing to starve ourselves.
Instead of investing our time in group activities like clubs or other hobby-focused groups, we are pouring our time into our jobs and into never-ending individual self-improvement schemes. But work is not a fundamental need, while community is.
I can testify based on my own experience, because I’ve made drastic changes as a result of what I’ve learned and I’m happier and healthier because of those changes. I will make even more in the years ahead.
This is what makes the issue of productivity versus idleness so very urgent. At the moment, we are self-destructive. It’s essential that we remember what is most fundamental to our species and return to a lifestyle that meets our primal needs. “Just because we have a capacity for change,” says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, “does not mean that we will necessarily change for the better. Evolution frequently results in outcomes that are highly undesirable for long-term human welfare.”
In a short span of about two hundred years, we have stepped far away from human nature and tried to push ourselves further toward digital existence and isolation. This will hurt us in the long run if we can’t learn to limit our use of these tools. Not eliminate them, but accept reasonable limits. Noam Chomsky once said that “humans may well be a nonviable organism.” He was talking about our propensity to destroy the planet; I think his words also apply to our propensity to destroy ourselves.
A return to our own basic humanity is overdue. It is now a question not of preference but of survival.