People are monkeys pretending to be robots

Plus, the forest vs. Fifth Avenue, medical students riot in Vancouver, and why your brain is like 3 kids in a trenchcoat

Imagine that you’re sitting in a boardroom. You’re on the 69th floor of a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan. You look out the window and you see the Hudson River, plus the high floors of other nearby skyscrapers.

Your company is in the final stages of negotiating a million dollar deal. If you get this deal, your company will be profitable for the first time ever, and you will personally get a $100,000 bonus check. But if it goes poorly, you’ll run out of money and you and all your coworkers will be fired.

The meeting gets off to a good start. They’re about to sign the deal. In about 15 minutes, you will be $100,000 richer.

Then you rip a big fart. Ptbtbtbtbtbhhhhh.

Everyone hears it, everyone smells it, and everyone knows it was you.

The CEO of the other company gets offended and calls off the deal. Then he calls security to escort you out of the building.

Why?

Just because you farted doesn’t mean you’re not a competent businessperson. Maybe you’re sick. Or maybe you just ate a burrito with spicy peppers and pinto beans. Neither of those things would in any way indicate that you can’t do a good job on the deal.

Also, even if you agree that farting makes you look bad, why is it such a big deal? Why can’t you just overlook it? Is it really worth scrapping a million dollar deal just because one guy farted?

Monkeys vs. Robots

In 2011, after the Vancouver Canucks lost in the Stanley Cup Finals, there were riots in the streets in Vancouver.

People flipped over cars. They smashed windows. They stomped on porta-potties to crush them like soda cans. They set fire to a bunch of stuff.

The Vancouver police chief thought that the rioters were “criminals and anarchists” who didn’t care about hockey, they just wanted to riot. He was wrong.

This was right around the time that smartphones were becoming a big deal, so everyone was taking pictures, so some of the rioters got identified. Most of them were just regular people. Some of them were college students. Some of them had office jobs. Some of them were medical students about to become doctors. Et cetera.

People pretend that they’re “civilized”. But if we have a few beers and our hockey team loses a big game, and then other people start rioting in the streets, we’ll go out and join them. We’ll topple over police cars and burn down restaurants, just to blow off steam. Why?

The truth is that our brains are like 3 kids stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat. At the bottom is our lizard brain, and then our mammal brain, which want to sleep and eat and have sex and play video games. 

And then there’s our puny little human brain. It wants to build spaceships and talk about philosophy. The problem is, your human brain is brand new by evolutionary terms, and doesn’t really have that much control.

Human beings are monkeys pretending to be robots. We work very hard to create the illusion that our human brain is in charge. But really, our human brain is our weakest brain of the 3. It’s the servant of the lizard and mammal brains.

Our brains are like 3 kids in a trenchcoat trying to get into an R-rated movie. The kids are pretending to be one adult, but they are really 3 children. Similarly, our brains pretend to be 1 adult, but are really 3 children. (And the most mature of the 3 children has almost no say in what happens.)

This is why we’re supposed go to the bathroom, fart, have sex, and do basically every other “animal” thing we do in private, instead of publicly. This is why we’re supposed to wear clothes instead of walking around naked. Et cetera.

Adam and Eve didn’t feel self-conscious about being naked until they ate from the tree of knowledge. This is a great metaphor for humans — once we became intelligent, we started pretending we weren’t monkeys anymore.

Why do we pretend we’re not animals? Because animals are dangerous and unpredictable. (If you don’t believe me, try hanging out with a tiger.)

You don’t want to hang out with people who are dangerous and unpredictable. You don’t want to date them, you don’t want to hire them, and you don’t want to be their friend. (This is why that company cancelled your million-dollar deal when you ripped that big fart in their boardroom.)

So if you want to have friends, go on dates, and make money, you have to show that you can control your animal side.

Why Being A Robot Is Bad For You

The “dog whisperer” Cesar Millan grew up on a farm in rural Mexico, where he was constantly surrounded by dogs.

When he was young he moved to Mazatlán. He noticed that the dogs in Mazatlán were way less happy and less healthy than the dogs on his farm. That’s because dogs did not evolve to live in cities; they evolved to live in nature.

Then he moved to America at a young age, and he noticed that the dogs in America were even less happy than the dogs in Mexican cities. That’s because rich American suburban homes are even less like dogs’ natural environments than Mexican cities.

Humans work the same way. If you think of the happiest, healthiest people you know, you’ll probably notice that most of them grew up in rural areas. That’s because we evolved to live in nature.

Don’t believe me? Imagine yourself walking through a forest — there’s a calm breeze, nobody is around, you are surrounded by tall trees. Now imagine yourself walking down Fifth Avenue — there are cars whizzing by, honking their horns, you’re surrounded by other pedestrians, and some dude with a thick New York accent is trying to sell you a hot dog for $15. Where do you feel safer?
 
 The truth is that you are safer on Fifth Avenue. In the forest, you might get attacked by a bear. But there are no bears on Fifth Avenue.

Top: a forest, where you feel at peace but might get attacked by a bear. Bottom: Fifth Avenue, which is chaotic but mostly safe.

So you can’t be a robot all the time. You would drive yourself crazy. So instead, you need to treat yourself like a dumb monkey with animal and spiritual needs.

Our animal side is the side that makes us happy. We enjoy playing sports, hanging out with our friends, praying to God, eating delicious food, having sex, and maybe joining the occasional riot. Without that stuff, life would not be worth living. So the more of your animal side you sacrifice, the more miserable you get, and the more your animal side comes out in ways you don’t want.

This is why there are some socially acceptable outlets to “let go” and act more like an animal — like at a baseball game, or a bar, or in an angry mob.

The more you pretend you’re a robot, the more you’ll need to “let go”. For example, college students in the United States work their butts off doing meaningless make-work so they can get good jobs or get into good graduate schools. Most schoolwork is hard, pointless, depressing, and no fun. So college students get shitfaced blackout drunk every weekend.

The same thing happens in Japan. Japan has by far the most intense work culture of any country. Japanese people also get shitfaced after work more than any other country.

Similarly, “rational” people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, who try to ignore their animal instincts, usually go crazy If you watch either of these dudes in an interview, you can see them get angry at how irrational other people are (which is an irrational thing to be angry about). And when Donald Trump became president it practically broke Sam Harris’s brain.

You have to be in touch with your animal side. Otherwise, you will go insane. It’s not healthy to always pretend you’re a robot: your true nature will come out somewhere.

The problem is, our era of history is the least in touch with its animal nature in all of human history.

There are 2 reasons why. The first is that more people today live in cities than ever before. When you live in a hunter-gatherer troupe, or on a farm, your life comes down to how much food you can collect and kill. But cities are social environments: you navigate them by making friends and by getting other people to pay you for stuff. Today we’re playing a game that we didn’t evolve to play.

The second is that our society works like a machine. Everything has to be delivered on time, or else our whole supply chain falls apart.

For example, imagine you supply fresh fish to restaurants. One day you decide you don’t feel like going to work. That day, the restaurants you sell to have to explain to all their customers that they can’t serve them any fresh fish that day. The customers are mad. So the restaurants you sell to fire you. Then they replace you with someone who goes fishing every day, even when he doesn’t feel like it.

For society to work like a machine, people need to act like cogs in that machine. They need to wake up at 6 AM every morning so they can show up to work at 8 AM every morning, because if they show up at 8:01, everything falls apart.

This is what happens if you show up for work at 8:01, not 8:00.

But people don’t make very good cogs, because we don’t want to do the same thing every single day. If you’re a garbageman then you have to get up at 4 AM every day to go collect garbage, even if you feel like sleeping in and writing poetry.

(This is why people whose jobs involve repeating the same steps over and over again for low stakes — like bureaucrats, assembly line workers, and call center employees — are miserable. Whereas Navy SEALS, who get shot at and have to swim in freezing cold waters and have objectively worse job conditions than coal miners, are usually pretty happy.)

That’s why order to get a job at most companies, you have to act “professional”. Really, acting “professional” is just signaling your ability to suppress your animal side and pretend you’re a corporate robot. The better you can be a pretend-robot, the more they trust you’ll be a good cog in their machine.

The better our technology gets, the more we can turn ourselves into good cogs. Right now we drink coffee and take drugs like Adderall so we can work longer hours. But the more we do stuff like this, the more miserable we get.

This is what the Unabomber was angry about. In his manifesto Industrial Society And Its Future, Ted Kaczynski basically says that as society becomes more and more like a machine, we’ll invent more and more stuff to turn people into better cogs. We’ll develop better and better drugs to dampen the emotions that make us so unpredictable. Maybe this will make our industrial machine work better — but it will make our lives miserable, too.

Ted Kaczynski, the most important philosopher of the 20th century.

How To Fuse Your Monkey Brain With Your Rational Brain

Modern corporate culture tells us to suppress our animal instincts. But Robert Greene has different advice.

In his book Mastery, he says that the greatest masters throughout history — people like Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, and Benjamin Franklin, who were really fucking good at what they do — channeled their animal instincts into their work. Instead of trying to suppress their monkey brain, they use it to guide them.

Your monkey brain is a powerful thing. If you try to fight it with your rational brain, you’re gonna lose, because your emotions are stronger than your thoughts.

It’s better to get the different parts of your brain to work together, instead of fighting each other. You can’t squash your emotions, but you can redirect them.

This is pretty hard and it takes a long time to pull off. You’re not gonna do it right away. But if you want to get your human brain and your monkey brain in sync, how do you do it?

There are 2 things you have to do. First, you have to practice your craft for years and years. You have to develop all the muscle memory and learn all the knowledge you need to do it well. This builds connections between the human and animal parts of your brain.

And second, you have to love the thing you do. You have to wake up in the morning excited to get to work on it. Because if you don’t love what you do, your emotions are gonna get in your way.

Hey! Thanks for reading.

My name’s Theo and every Monday I publish an article like this one about whatever was on my mind the week before. Usually it’s about human nature or human society.

If you liked this article, you may also like this article about why being too smart makes you stupid:

Don’t have time to read another full article right now? You can also hit the “subscribe now” button below:

Happy trails!