Technology, Part III: A Fish Out of Water
What kinds of mismatch has technology created?
In the first two articles of this series, I argued that in the long run—as in, throughout the course of human history—technology hasn’t improved life satisfaction or led to more leisure. This is more than a tad puzzling given that technology allows us to do something better than before—newer, faster, or more efficiently. Surely this improvement would result in people being happier and working less, right? Not really.1
Some readers may have a strong reaction to this, calling to mind all the evils previous humans had to endure, from warfare and starvation to cold and disease. But the main flaw in this kind of thinking—aside from the fact that the last 150 years have been the bloodiest in history,2 or that around nine million people die every year from starvation—is that it compares then to now. Nobody in their right mind would choose to poop in an outhouse when the current alternative is available. But the question is—was it miserable when there was no other choice? Is it plausible, even, that it was enjoyable when it represented the state-of-the-art?
As a therapist, I don’t really care about people’s material conditions (as long as they can pay!)—I care about how their material conditions make them feel.
Humans’ subjective experience is dominated by adaptation and comparison. Most of the changes in our lives have no long-term effect on our happiness, and central to the determination of whether something is good or bad is whether it is better or worse than our previous position or the position of those around us. This is why, for the most part, the experiential impact of technology is to provide a short-term wave of feelings that soon equilibrates.3
Other effects of technology are more permanent. Technology has dramatically increased how long we live, how much information we can access, and how much we can produce. We are now capable of feeding a global population of eight billion two to three times over—not that we do, but still. We also continue to breach the frontiers of space, the deep ocean, the mysteries of physics, and the distant past. These are the kinds of outcomes that come naturally to people’s minds in defense of technology.
There are negative effects, too, of course. Destroying the planet is one. Concentration of power is another. Destructive capacity is a third. But, as you well know by now, the one I care about is much more subtle. Evolutionary mismatch doesn’t grab any headlines or burst through the front door, yet in my opinion, it is far more relevant to our daily experience than any other byproduct of technological progress, which has steadily been changing both the world around us and how we interact with it.
So, without any further ado, here is a working list of how evolutionary mismatch shows up in everyday life:
Abundance of Abundance. Humans evolved for scarcity, which means we don’t have many defenses against abundance. Yet abundance is what we are surrounded by. This leads to a variety of unfortunate outcomes, from hoarding and obesity to substance abuse and debt.
Non-reliance on Others. The more tech a person has, the less they need other people. Out of sugar? Don’t ask your neighbor; just get it delivered. Want to know how something works? Don’t ask your grandparents; ask ChatGPT. Technology’s tendency to promote individualism is one of the key themes of Jean Twenge’s Generations.
Scarcity of Risk. It might be that humans need a certain amount of risk to develop properly (when young) and to feel alive (when older). But as technology vacuums risk out of the world, our tolerance for risk follows suit. Hence the recommendation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that kids under 13 ride in the back seat. Hell, my grandpa was probably driving at 13! Twenge, Jon Haidt, and Peter Gray, among others, have hypothesized that a lack of unsupervised, risky, outdoor play might be largely responsible for the current teen mental health crisis.
Disconnection. When we drive, we are disconnected from the weather, smells, sounds, people, and general feel of the area we are driving through. Ditto with planes, only more so. The most common example of disconnection, of course, is when people are on their phones in public places, communicating with people who aren’t present. In all sorts of ways, technology undermines our ability to be where we are.
Pace of Change. How to fit in and add value in a society becomes all the more difficult when norms are constantly changing. Even more simply, how to operate in the world becomes more difficult when processes are constantly being updated. One significant byproduct of this is that the elderly are at risk of becoming obsolete both culturally and productively. The dangers of our “hyper-novel” world are at the heart of Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein’s A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century.
Separating Goods. In ancestral environments, the difference between what was good for your fitness (fitness-good) and what felt good (utility-good) was presumably small. It was supposed to be small, given that feelings evolved to motivate adaptive behavior. In the modern world, though, what is good for our genes is often different from what feels good. For example, it feels good to have one marshmallow now, but it would be better if we waited a few minutes and got two. Or would it?
Discomfiting Truths. Science and technology have made it much harder to believe much of which comforted people and brough them together in the past—for example, mythology and religion.4
Choice Overload. More choice isn’t always better. For example, many of my clients tell me that dating apps give them the impression that “a better match is just around the corner” or that finding a perfect match is possible. Both impressions prevent them from starting a relationship. The pitfalls of the syllogism “more freedom means more welfare, and more choice means more freedom” is the subject of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice.
Pressurized Sense of Time. In my opinion, one of the easier ways to undermine our experience is to ask if there is something better we could be doing with our time. Another is to task-switch so often that we never enter a “flow state.” I had a mentor in the corporate world who once shared the secret to his success: “I never do anything for more than 15 minutes.” Good for you? Furthermore, the modern time environment forces us to contemplate the past and future much more than our distant ancestors would have. It’s likely that hunter-gatherers lived in the present in a way that modern people only dream about.
Gross Inequality. For most of human history, until agriculture, people were limited in their material possessions to what they could carry and defend—and yes, that included children. There were still inequalities, of course—some people were bigger, brighter, more attractive, and so on—and thus people still felt envious or jealous. But there was never a gap as large as the one between me and Jeff Bezos. Inequality is bad for both individuals and society.5
The Wrong Kind of Stress. Stress has always been a part of human life. We know this because humans (and other mammals) have very old stress systems. However, our stress systems seem to be designed for certain kinds of stressors, namely those that are short-term, discrete, and physical, such as running from a lion or fighting another human. But modern humans increasingly encounter stress that is long-term, diffuse, and social, such as whether we’ll get that promotion 18 months from now or are “living our best life,” as everyone on Instagram seems to be doing. The effect of modern stress on our ancient physiology is the subject of Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.
Stimulus Overload. It’s a small miracle if you’ve made it to this point of the article without being distracted…
When I first outlined this piece, the subtitle for this section was “The Four Horsemen of Evolutionary Mismatch.” Then, after some reflection, I changed it to “Technology’s Seven Deadly Sins.” A few days later, it was “11 Stairways Away From Heaven.” Eventually, I realized there are hundreds of categories of evolutionary mismatch and thousands of discrete examples. The full list might rival that of cognitive distortions.
So much for breadth. How about depth? It’s not helpful to say that mismatch is ubiquitous and bad. We need to understand exactly what is bad about it so that we can work toward improvement. So let’s discuss two examples of mismatch in more detail.
Separating Goods.
In What To Do with Emotions Part II, Rob and I introduced the concepts of “fitness-good” and “utility-good.” Fitness-good is what is good for your genes; utility-good is what feels good. In environments of evolutionary adaptedness, there was significant overlap between these two. For those interested in eclipses—which, based on recent experience, is way too many of you—there was almost a totality. As Rob has hopefully hammered home by now, this overlap is because emotions were designed by natural selection to measure important information and motivate adaptive action. If you did something good for your fitness, it behooved you to feel good about it so you’d do it again, and vice versa.
This was a merry arrangement until, as a result of human technology, the environment began to change too fast for the clunky process of natural selection to keep up. The gap between fitness-good and utility-good has become so wide in the modern world that people are constantly at war with themselves. Whether I should have a croissant wasn’t much of a question in the past. Indeed, the reason a croissant tastes so good in the first place is that it packs a ton of calories; it’s much more efficient to eat a croissant in a minute than gnaw at a tuber for hours. But now that the environment is chock-full of croissants, it might make more sense to reach for a potato instead.6
This goes much deeper than most people realize. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that our entire emotional apparatus has been compromised. The main point of What To Do With Emotions, as well as books like Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, is that our ancient emotions are frequently counterproductive in the modern world. The adaptive advantage of anger, for example, was probably to change someone’s behavior in the future. But if it’s directed at a stranger who won’t be seen again, then anger is pointless—and potentially destructive. Because of this, Rob and I advised readers to reflect on the purpose of an emotion and ask whether that purpose was being served by the tempting action. Isn’t it a bit sad, though, that we need a template to think through when our emotions are constructive and when they aren’t?
Throughout most of human history, there was likely more commerce between emotion and suggested action. As Heying and Weinstein note, “Just as ‘smells good’ was a good proxy for ‘good for you’ until recently, so too was ‘tastes good’ a good proxy for ‘good for you.’”7 When goods separate, more of life has the distinct aftertaste of tradeoff.
Upending wisdom.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t have Substack in ancestral environments,8 but our ancestors did have oral histories, cultural traditions, and so on, which carried lessons about how to do things both practical and otherwise. One byproduct of this system was that elders were held in high esteem, which sounds like a nice consolation prize for having to pee multiple times throughout the night.9
About a decade ago, I visited Slovakia to see where my family lived before they came to the U.S. Some of my family still lives there, and one of them, Lubitza, was my guide. Luby was in her mid-thirties and I was in my mid-twenties. We spent a few days in Bratislava and then went to see her parents in a farming village in the east. Her parents didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Slovak, so they mostly stuffed me with food. One afternoon, desperate for some way to contribute—or just move—I asked Luby if we could help her mom make dinner. The three of us were soon rolling dough for pierogies.
It's hard to know why I remember that afternoon so well, but my best guess is that it seemed like an archetypal scene, one that had occurred millions of times throughout history. Luby’s mom was still much better than Luby at making pierogies, and because I was a hopeless case, she focused on fixing Luby’s minor mistakes more than my major ones. The two were also speaking continuously in Slovak, too much for it to be only about pierogies, and I later learned from an exasperated Luby that they’d been talking about dating.
“My mom has no idea what dating’s like now,” she said.
And, well, I guess that’s kind of the point.
Elderly people today, perhaps especially in the United States, are at the risk of becoming obsolete both productively (making pierogies) and culturally (knowing how to date). The ultimate reason for this is, of course, technology. The skills people learn as they progress throughout their careers are based for the most part on tools and processes that will have been long replaced by the time their grandchildren come around. In contrast, for most of human history, things changed so little that the elderly knew how to do most of the important stuff the best, even if they couldn’t do it as well. As Freud noted of this classic tradeoff: “If youth knew; if age could.”
The constant turnover of technology also changes cultural norms. Who doesn’t have a racist grandpa? Or gender-conforming grandma? Hell, many of my friends won’t let their own parents watch their kids—that’s how much parenting norms have changed. I find it both fascinating and a bit horrifying to think through which beliefs or practices of mine will cause my grandchildren to disown me, but I’m sure there will be some.
The net result is that there’s less reason to consult elders, except to marvel at how provincial their lives used to be. So you, like, rotated the circles to the digits you wanted and that called someone? Unfortunately, this trend will only intensify. The faster technology changes, the less the elderly can keep up.10 I’m really surprised this doesn’t get more coverage. It’s tragic, no?
A Fish out of Water
The net effect of all this mismatch is to produce what I would call a disjointed experience. But that may be too light a word.
Imagine you are a fish that gets hooked on a lure and reeled into a boat. Right off the bat, the main problem is that you cannot breathe. But if your captor were able to keep you alive by periodically delivering oxygen, you would begin to notice other, lesser, and harder-to-articulate evils of having to flop around in a boat.
First, your visual system would be out of whack. Not only would your vision be blurry, you’d have little to no context for what you were seeing. You wouldn’t know how to understand the uncomfortable feel from the side of the boat, either. What is that material? You might become frustrated that the evolved motion of your body wasn’t doing what it had always done—propel you forward—similar to how many people have dreams in which they run in place. What about wind? What would you do with that? Or snow? In short, if returned to water, you would have a hell of a time describing what happened to you, but there would be no question that it was bad. This, I think, is modern life in a nutshell.
Thus, rather than disjointed, we might say that modern experience is bizarre.
In the next article, I talk about why, even though technology is the cause of evolutionary mismatch, it’s also the only solution.
Coda: Shushing Mood
A final example of mismatch is a bit more whimsical but probably among the most relatable.
I have a friend—let’s call him Eddy—who is convinced that spontaneous get-togethers are the way to go. He doesn’t like scheduling things in advance because he’s not sure if he’ll be in the mood when the time comes. I’m sure we can all relate to this. Of course, what this means is that Eddy and I rarely hang out. As with most of my friends, my social calendar is booked weeks in advance. I am committed to these, as well as client appointments, writing blocks, vacations, and dentist appointments, regardless of whether I want to do them when the time comes.
In foraging societies, there was undoubtedly much less of a gap between mood and activity. I daresay that they were often one and the same. A person wanted to take a nap, and a few minutes later found themselves asleep. A person was restless, and a few minutes later found themselves on a walk.
In addition to having a variety of moods, humans have moods of different intensities. Concepts such as optimal foraging theory rely on humans’ ability to make cost-benefit analyses on the basis of mood strength. “I could eat, but the berry bush is half a mile away, so let me just rest instead.” “It’d be nice to play, but it’s really hot, so maybe I’ll just float in the river.”
The modern inability to indulge mood shows up in my practice frequently. Many clients feel stifled by everything they are committed to. They feel as if they are being chased by the day, rather than being given the ability to chase it. Plenty of clients talk about wanting to reclaim some ability to wake up and…see where the day takes them, as they occasionally do on vacation. It is the difference between proactivity and reactivity. But for a variety of reasons, people in the modern world cannot do what they want when they want to do it.
I mean, think about it this way. The modern person holds their bladder much longer than a forager does.
Some solid books on evolutionary mismatch:
A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
It has for certain periods of time, of course. For example, from the Industrial Revolution to now, people across the world have been working less. But what about before the Industrial Revolution? Indeed, what about before civilization? Many anthropologists maintain that hunter-gatherers were the “original affluent society” because of how easily they met their basic needs.
Granted, as Steven Pinker has pointed out, a better metric might be per capita deaths from violence, which has been declining for quite some time.
As Adam Mastroianni wonders in You can’t be too happy, literally : “Why, whenever I get a new iPhone, do I feel like ‘Woohoo my new iPhone so cool so fast the future is now’ and then 24 hours later I’m like ‘My life is normal, I have always had this phone and it makes me feel nothing’?”
Even culture, to be honest. Many cultural ideas and traditions have been undermined by the cold, hard facts of science.
As Thoreau says in Walden of his experiment in simple living: “I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.”
Every organism at every point in time experiences evolutionary mismatch because of how evolution works. Organisms can only respond, by blind mutation, to changes in the environment, which means physiological change always lags environmental change. It’s just that humans have supercharged environmental change via their technology, leaving their ability to adapt in the dust.
p. 78
Or, as an anthropologist would say: “There is no direct evidence of the website known as Substack existing among paleolithic cultures, although of course that does not rule out the possibility.”
My favorite example of this “consolation prize” comes courtesy of Lewis and Clark’s journals. Apparently there was a hunting ceremony tradition among some of the Native American Plains tribes wherein younger hunters would beg successful, elderly hunters to sleep with their wives, hoping some of the skill would pass on in the exchange. Talk about respecting your elders!
In the technological societies in which we live, productive capacity depends on one’s ability to leverage the latest tools. This requires an adaptability and flexibility of mind that decreases as we age, meaning that even if older people (say, someone in their fifties) wanted to keep up, they would be at a severe cognitive disadvantage compared to someone who is in their 20s. “It ain’t jus’ knowin’,” Tom says to Casy in The Grapes of Wrath about fixing cars. “It’s more’n that…Got to grow into her when you’re a little kid.”
GM Josh: is this the last installment? I hate to read your posts "in pieces" so if this is not the last, i'd prefer to wait. Thanks.
That's just brilliant Josh. I have shared the bullet points on twitter. I get so much enjoyment from reading your blog posts. Thanks a lot!