Abundance is more difficult to handle than scarcity

If a book of 200 pages contained the history of humans proportional to the years, only 1 page would be dedicated to civilized societies based on farming. The industrial era would be covered in merely 2 lines! Almost all of the book would be about the life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Since humans have always been hunter-gatherers (called so because their lives depended on hunting animals and gathering edibles from plants) except very recently, our brain and body are designed to live in the hunter-gatherers’ world (the African savannah) instead of cities and villages.

That’s because evolution designs the bodies of the species to adjust to their surroundings so as to optimize for survival and reproduction. And evolution, as you know, is an extremely slow process. 10,000 years is an insignificant fraction in evolutionary terms.

The surroundings of our hunter-gatherer ancestors were quite opposite to what we see around us. There was rarely any abundance; there were only shortages. In that world, natural selection ensured that our body and brain are designed to survive and thrive under scarcity.

High caloric food (a fat animal or a ripe fruit) was always in short supply because you always had to work hard for it. On many days you would fail to fill your stomach. So, when you succeed in killing a juicy buffalo, eat as much as you can.

All fear was worth being fearful of. When your tribe-mate doubts that the thing moving behind the tall grass is a tiger, you better run—even if he is wrong 9 out of 10 times. Avoid the novel mushroom if there is a rumour that it is poisonous. Only the paranoid survived.

All the information was useful information. Where to cross the river from, how to make arrow-heads and what the weird shouts of the monkeys mean—all were the essential information for survival. Be information hungry.

All man-made things were useful things. Sharp spearheads were always in high demand. Making them was a time consuming process and lack of them meant you end-up being a meal while trying to find a meal. The thick fur of the dead bear you found near the cave is priceless; the winter is coming. Grab everything you get your hands on.

And then suddenly our world changed dramatically. After learning farming roughly 10,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens started living in civilized societies. Cereals grown in his backyard became his staple food.

We started understanding science about half-a-millennium ago (thanks to Galelio, Newton and others), and then the industrial revolution (merely a couple of centuries ago) ensured that the rate-of-change in our surroundings picked up exponential growth. Modernity is quite a recent phenomenon.

The change resulted in an abundance that was alien to our ancestors—mostly for the good. 

Suddenly, we can have chips, chicken wings and coca-cola on demand. Information became so easily available that it soon resulted in the game of click-baits. At least 20 news channels are running breaking news 24x7, usually spreading irrational fear. And consumerism ensures that we can never run out of anything we want, unless we run out of money. Buy one, get two.

Abundance—that had not been imagined by evolution while writing our genetic code—has suddenly become commonplace. The slowness of evolution meant it could not get any time to redesign our body and brain. Genetic hard-wiring couldn’t be changed in a few millennia.

The abundance left our hunter-gatherer brains confused. The brain still listens to the news-anchor’s nonsense with sincerity. When we see a sugary cookie on the plate, the brain still thinks you should eat it immediately believing there is always a looming danger of starvation. When we see the signboard “offer closes soon”, we are swayed by the fear-of-missing-out without realizing it.

During scarcity, our instincts are with us; during abundance, the instincts work against us.  Abundance, therefore, is more difficult to handle than scarcity. Modernity is when instincts became liabilities.

So what can we do? Resisting the instincts hardly works. Willpower won’t last long, so try modifying the systems. Then slowly, let the habits build.