Animal Instincts
Central to my philosophy is the idea that everything a man does is driven by the desire to become their self-projection and attain a feeling of importance.
I’ve never been interested in telling people how to be happy, because I’ve always found it a futile exercise and one that only fed the self-improvement frenzy that was born in the US in the 21th century.
Instead, I’ve always been intrigued to define what happiness is, to dissect it to its most elemental components. I’ve written multiple times about how, in my view, happiness is only defined in relation to how far or close we feel from our self-projection, that is, the ideal version of ourselves. Our self-projection is always one that includes a feeling of importance, in which we are valued and appreciated by other people, and to which all our actions tend to.
However, as someone driven to explore human behaviour through the lens of evolutionary anthropology, there was a piece — or rather a question — that was missing: where does the need to feel important come from?
This essay tries to explore this question.
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Survival
You and I and all the rest of human beings, are inherently, at our most basic level, animals.
We evolved hiding in the trees while stronger, faster, and more dangerous creatures threatened our survival. This allowed us to develop a robust neurological system for identifying threats, gauging their severity, and responding quickly, often before we’re conscious of the threat level. But fight or flight alone wasn’t going to get us out of the forests. We needed something more: cooperation. Teaming up with others, it turned out, was essential for our survival. The stronger and better our group was at finding and sharing resources, the greater our chances of making it. In palaeolithic times, our survival depended on us sticking together and collaborating in groups. And it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe, because failing to do so would often mean ostracization and death.
Being rejected or ostracized by our peers for whatever reason would leave us to face the wolves and the lions all by ourselves. In that situation, social rejection could equal death. It makes sense, then, that some of that instinct is still riding around in our DNA, even today, and that getting rejected can sometimes feel like a fate worse than death.
What’s the opposite of getting rejected? Feeling approved and valued. Being approved means that we are more likely to have people around us, our tribe, that would care for us and help us in times of difficulty. That awareness soothes our anxieties, lowers our cortisol level and increases our serotonin, which in turn improves our well-being. Hence why we seek a feeling of importance, because we are wired to it since the earliest stages of human evolution.
Fast forward to some thousand years later, from the moment we are born, we humans feel a never-ending need for attention. That same attention that we needed when we were hunter-gatherers in order not to remain alone and increase our chances of survival, has remained so wired in our brain. But while back then we needed others around us to survive, we have now supplanted the need for survival with a need to feel important and valued.
With this comes the need to continually rank ourselves and measure our self-worth through our status, once again a tribal instinct that allows us to feel more secure we will not get ostracised by the group if we attain certain things the group deems as valuable.
This is the mechanic that made social media apps like Facebook and Instagram omni-present in 21st century society. When a bunch of people tap that little heart on your latest Instagram post, it feels like the modern version of the tribe giving you a nod of approval. The flip side of that is that when the likes don’t come, it triggers a kind of low-level panic. To our ancient brains, this isn’t just a minor letdown; it feels like a serious threat, pushing us to keep checking for updates like it’s vital information. That’s also why it’s so hard to ignore a new text message, even when it’s clearly a bad idea (like while driving). To the Paleolithic part of our minds, ignoring that ping is the same as turning your back on someone trying to get your attention around the campfire: socially risky, and potentially dangerous.
Through the quality of attention we receive from others, we feel recognized and appreciated for who we are. Our sense of self-worth depends on this. Because this is so important to the human animal, people will do almost anything to get attention (including committing a crime or attempting suicide). Look behind any action, and you will see this need as a primary motivation.
The problem with craving attention is that it might not be reciprocated: there is only so much attention others can give us, and people can largely be indifferent to our fate, as they must deal with their own problems.
In this, our self-projection helps us make sense of the silence of the world around us. “When I will achieve that self-projection I will be appreciated, and I will be happy”, we repeat to ourselves. All those projects that we start in life serve this purpose: once I get that degree, I will finally be able to get the job I want and with that will come money and appreciation from people. This is only one example, but you get the idea. The self-projection we create allows us to create an image of ourselves that comforts us and makes us feel validated from within. When we experience those inevitable moments when we are alone or not feeling appreciated, we can retreat to this self and soothe ourselves. It is a coping mechanism that has evolved over thousands of year, which stems from our survival instinct.
Reproduction
Our quest for survival is also inevitably tied to our need to reproduce. This has made it so that sex is the highest form of pleasure a man or a woman could seek. And to achieve this feeling of pleasure, man has engaged in all sorts of pursuits to acquire a feeling of importance that could better position them to attract a mate.
Falling in love, from a naturalistic point of view, serves to facilitate humans in their amorous intentions and provides the drive to procreate
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, traits that signal status, resource acquisition, and social dominance are not just social constructs but mating strategies. Displays of importance and social approval have historically increased reproductive opportunities, ensuring that the drive for social validation became hardwired into human psychology.
You don’t buy a a classic car or a sports car only to drive it by yourself: chances are you picture next to you a partner to go somewhere on the weekends with and possibly have a romantic relationship with suich person. You don’t just dream of that high paying job because of the money per se, but rather because of the increased chances that you will be able to have more resources to attract the perfect partner you have been picturing in your mind.
Animals
Animals feel fear for a brief time, then it is gone. We dwell on our fears, intensifying them and making them last well past the moment of danger, even to the point of feeling constant anxiety. This detachment between emotion and cognition makes it so that we can experience persistent fears disconnected from real threats, leading to chronic anxiety.
Animals don’t hold principles, they don’t show resentments among themselves, they just want to eat, survive and reproduce.
British philosopher David Hume maintained that “reason is, and ought to be a slave to the passions.” The Scottish empiricist was not arguing that we should all embrace unreason, but rather that our body is naturally already outfitted to operate rationally, and we are only complicating things if we attempt to find a priori rules of conduct that the mind would haughtily dictate to our body.
The greatest form of rationality is sometimes simply being able to listen to our gut feelings; our body tells us much more than we can cognitively process.
While definitive research on the topic is hard to establish, it is a well-known thing that our body collects many more information than our mind can consciously process: prior learnings, situations you’ve been in, movies you’ve watched and all the things that you’ve been through in your life, all help to make predictions in a way that our conscious mind, burdened with emotions and biases, can often have trouble with.
In his quest to define ‘rationality’, Justin E. H. Smith emphasizes how animals and plants “always get things right.” He attributes this to the absence of deliberation in animals and plants, which allows them to do what they do without error. In other words, Smith writes, “animals are more rational than human beings because, lacking higher cognition, they can only be rational. Higher cognition gives us, on this line of thinking, not rationality, but only irrationality.”
[If you are interested in the topic, I highly recommend Smith’s book Irrationality — A History of the Dark Side of Reason]
This counters the widely held view that human beings are rational, and animals are not, because human beings are capable of entertaining propositions, and making inferences based on them.
In his Dialogue Between Nature and a Soul, Giacomo Leopardi wrote:
“Brute animals readily adapt all their faculties and powers to the attainment of their ends; but men rarely do so, being usually prevented by their reason and imagination, which give birth to a thousand doubts in deliberation, and a thousand hindrances in execution. The less men are inclined or accustomed to deliberate, the more prompt are they in decision, and the more vigorous in action. But such souls as yours, self-contained, and proudly conscious of their greatness, are really powerless for self-rule, and often succumb to irresolution both in thought and action. This temperament is one of the greatest curses of human life.”
Ours is a flawed faculty because our will is infinite, while our understanding is finite, as Descartes would argue. If we were simply not to will ourselves to draw conclusions about what our understanding does not yet know, then we would never be in error. Brute beasts, to the extent that they have no free will, for the same reason are incapable of error.
This is a characteristic of humans that is not observed in other animals. They stay where they are; humans must move forward, beyond.
Philosophy in a sense has always been a tool for man to escape his animalistic nature. It started with the world of ideas with Plato and was reinforced a couple thousand years later with the narrative of the Ubermench, reinforced the concept of going beyond our inherent limitations and the natural order.
Man is just an animal who has had the misfortune of developing an extremely complex brain that drives him to want to push beyond his body, to reach for something transcendental that does not exist, because this existence, in fact, has no ultimate purpose or reward for all the effort expended.
Conclusion
It sounds like a paradox that to understand man, a species that has always tried to escape its animalistic nature, and that in the process has invented philosophy in order to assuage this need, one has to go to the root, it’s biology.
We are wired for survival, we are not wired for happiness. Building a positive prospect and narrative about the future gives us the necessary energy to surviving. And as animals, this is what we are wired to achieve: survival, not happiness. In human beings this evolutionary trait comes in the form of seeking a feeling of importance.
We are animals and as such if only we spent more time understanding our own very nature instead of constantly trying of reach for the stars, we would probably be better equipped to face life and its absurdity.
Our need for importance and recognition is not a modern weakness but a relic of our evolutionary past. And perhaps true wisdom lies not in denying our animal nature but in learning to navigate it thoughtfully. By recognizing the evolutionary origins of our desires, we can become more compassionate toward ourselves and others when we crave validation or feel anxious about rejection, thus creating healthier relationships with status, attention, and the elusive pursuit of happiness.
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These reflections are just the beginning of a much larger conversation. If you’re interested in exploring these ideas further, I’d love to hear your thoughts — schedule a call with me here.
