The Ice-Age mind

(This entry was accidentally deleted. Thanks to Google for caching it until I came back.)

Once we have our biological needs covered, the primate mind becomes obsessed with status in the pack and making grand plans for securing and improving that status. It will think up elaborate scenarios in the future, or obsess over unresolved issues of the past. This may have made perfect sense 40 000 years ago when the current mindset was born in the death throes of the Ice Age. Life was nasty, brutish and short. You had to secure the best possible mate and then compete fiercely for the few available resources if your offspring were to survive. We are the descendants of those survivors. It is written in our blood and bones to act in this way - but we are no longer huddling in a gorge near the glacier. Our challenges today are completely different. All we need to do is look around and see. The taxman is not a cave lion, so the adrenaline rush of anger is only going to give you a heart attack, not save your children. The winter is not going to come with no food, so there is no reason to double your body mass while there is still food on the table. And for us poor males: The chances of building a harem are quite slim (not to mention that succeeding would probably be quite unpleasant with today's hard-nosed women), so it is pointless to try to impress every woman in sight and try to intimidate possible rivals.

The Ice-Age ego was a big step up from all that existed before, and it has benefited from many upgrades and patches, but it really is ripe for replacement.