The Game You Don’t Need to Play

In Ernest Becker’s brilliant work, The Denial of Death, he writes this about humanity: We are gods with anuses.

 
Hidden within its hilarity is a profound point.

Becker was referring to the fundamental tension that lives at the heart of the human condition: We are equipped with godlike imaginations, but are constrained by the biology of our evolutionary lineage. No matter how amazing the byproducts of our minds are (architecture, technology, literature, etc.), we still have to defecate just like our monkey ancestors, and will slowly deteriorate until the day our bodies cease to function.

In other words, the transcendent abilities of the mind have a hard limit, and that limit is the hardware we inherited from our evolutionary ancestors.

But I’d argue that this tension goes beyond our biology. If anything, so many of our modern struggles are the result of the primitive operating system that is shipped within each fresh mind.

There are far too many psychological attributes of this primitive OS to name, but for today, I’m going to touch on just one:

The pursuit of status.

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Πηγή: moretothat.com