At this point, I’m left wondering why humans evolved to be so gosh-darn negative all the time. It feels like there must be some hidden upside to being negative that just hasn’t occurred to me.
Some guesses:
Compared with the rest of the nature, and even with large parts of humankind, we live incredibly lucky lives. Our monkey brains were not designed for this, they are probably designed to keep a certain level of unhappiness, so they invent some if they don’t enough from outside. Similarly how our immune systems in absence of parasites develop alergies. Our mechanisms for fighting problems do not have an off switch, because in nature there was no reason to evolve one.
There is probably also some status aspect in this. If you are low status, you better don’t express too much happiness in front of higher status monkeys, because they will punish you just to teach you where is your place. That’s probably because low status itself makes people unhappy, so if you are not unhappy enough, it seems like you are claiming higher status.
I would expect many people to provide a rationalization: “But if I will be happy, that will make me less logical! And I will not be motivated to improve things.” (But I think that is nonsense, because unhappiness is also an emotion, and also interferes with logic. And unhappy people probably have less “willpower” to improve things.)
I’ll use the term “threat” for a problem where avoidance and/or submission is a good way of dealing it.
If a tiger is known to live in a particular part of a forest, that is a threat: Avoiding that part of the forest is a good way of dealing with the problem. If I take part in a hunting expedition and I don’t do my part because I’m too much of a coward, that is also a threat: If I act as if nothing happened and eat as much food as I want, etc. then my fellow tribespeople will think I’m an obnoxious jerk and I’ll be liable to get kicked out. So submission is a good way of dealing with this problem.
If I’m hungry or sleepy or I have homework to do or I need to get a job, those are not threats, even though they have potentially dire consequences: ignoring these problems is not going to make them go away.
Hypothesis: the EEA was full of threats according to my definition; the modern world has fewer such threats. However, we’re wired to assume our environment is full of threats. We’re also wired to believe that if a problem is a serious one, it’s likely a threat. So we’re more likely to exhibit the avoidance behavior for serious problems like finding a job than for trivial ones like solving a puzzle.
(I like the idea of co-opting the word “threat” because then you can repeat phrases like “this is not a threat” in your internal monologue to reassure yourself, if you’ve checked to see if something is a threat and it doesn’t seem to be.)
This seems correct. In a jungle, the cost of failure is frequently death. In our society, when you live an ordinary life (so this does not apply to things like organized crime or playing with explosives), the costs are much smaller, and there is much fun to be gained. But our brains are biased to believe they are in the jungle; they incorrectly perceive many things as tiger equivalents.
This is kind of nitpicky, but “the cost of failure is frequently death” is not the same as “avoidance and/or submission is a good way of dealing with the problem”. It’s not enough to show that in the EEA things could kill you… you have to show that they could kill you, and that trying hard not to think about them was the best way to avoid having them kill you.
I found some interesting thoughts in the book Learned Optimism about the evolutionary usefulness of pessimism:
The benefits of pessimism may have arisen during our recent evolutionary history. We are animals of the Pleistocene, the epoch of the ice ages. Our emotional makeup has most recently been shaped by one hundred thousand years of climactic catastrophe: waves of cold and heat; drought and flood; plenty and sudden famine. Those of our ancestors who survived the Pleis- tocene may have done so because they had the capacity to worry incessantly about the future, to see sunny days as mere prelude to a harsh winter, to brood. We have inherited these ancestors’ brains and therefore their ca- pacity to see the cloud rather than the silver lining.
...
Pessimism produces inertia rather than activity in the face of setbacks.
If the weather is very cold and your brain’s probability estimate of finding any game in the frost is low, maybe inactivity really is the best approach. But if I, as a modern human, am not calorie-constrained, then inactivity seems less wise.
I like that link!
Some guesses:
Compared with the rest of the nature, and even with large parts of humankind, we live incredibly lucky lives. Our monkey brains were not designed for this, they are probably designed to keep a certain level of unhappiness, so they invent some if they don’t enough from outside. Similarly how our immune systems in absence of parasites develop alergies. Our mechanisms for fighting problems do not have an off switch, because in nature there was no reason to evolve one.
There is probably also some status aspect in this. If you are low status, you better don’t express too much happiness in front of higher status monkeys, because they will punish you just to teach you where is your place. That’s probably because low status itself makes people unhappy, so if you are not unhappy enough, it seems like you are claiming higher status.
I would expect many people to provide a rationalization: “But if I will be happy, that will make me less logical! And I will not be motivated to improve things.” (But I think that is nonsense, because unhappiness is also an emotion, and also interferes with logic. And unhappy people probably have less “willpower” to improve things.)
I’ll use the term “threat” for a problem where avoidance and/or submission is a good way of dealing it.
If a tiger is known to live in a particular part of a forest, that is a threat: Avoiding that part of the forest is a good way of dealing with the problem. If I take part in a hunting expedition and I don’t do my part because I’m too much of a coward, that is also a threat: If I act as if nothing happened and eat as much food as I want, etc. then my fellow tribespeople will think I’m an obnoxious jerk and I’ll be liable to get kicked out. So submission is a good way of dealing with this problem.
If I’m hungry or sleepy or I have homework to do or I need to get a job, those are not threats, even though they have potentially dire consequences: ignoring these problems is not going to make them go away.
Hypothesis: the EEA was full of threats according to my definition; the modern world has fewer such threats. However, we’re wired to assume our environment is full of threats. We’re also wired to believe that if a problem is a serious one, it’s likely a threat. So we’re more likely to exhibit the avoidance behavior for serious problems like finding a job than for trivial ones like solving a puzzle.
(I like the idea of co-opting the word “threat” because then you can repeat phrases like “this is not a threat” in your internal monologue to reassure yourself, if you’ve checked to see if something is a threat and it doesn’t seem to be.)
This seems correct. In a jungle, the cost of failure is frequently death. In our society, when you live an ordinary life (so this does not apply to things like organized crime or playing with explosives), the costs are much smaller, and there is much fun to be gained. But our brains are biased to believe they are in the jungle; they incorrectly perceive many things as tiger equivalents.
This is kind of nitpicky, but “the cost of failure is frequently death” is not the same as “avoidance and/or submission is a good way of dealing with the problem”. It’s not enough to show that in the EEA things could kill you… you have to show that they could kill you, and that trying hard not to think about them was the best way to avoid having them kill you.
I found some interesting thoughts in the book Learned Optimism about the evolutionary usefulness of pessimism:
...
If the weather is very cold and your brain’s probability estimate of finding any game in the frost is low, maybe inactivity really is the best approach. But if I, as a modern human, am not calorie-constrained, then inactivity seems less wise.