Let me be blunt: This site is probably not for you. Most people find comfort in boring lives; this site is for the minority pre-disposed for adventure. Most people believe that hard work is a virtue; this site is for those the minority who understand that there’s no such thing as a work horse, let alone a work human. Most people believe that happiness is something bestowed upon us by religion and eternal and ethereal quests; this site is for the minority who understand that humans in wild conditions have been flourishing for hundreds of thousands of years.
The Paleo Diet Meets Paleo Psychology
Humans evolved to have a few friends, play, eat, work (a little), love, play, and make love (and play). Humans did not evolve to sit in traffic, hang out at the gym, farm, have 2.7 million neighbors, or eat food that’s been pre-chewed by robots from a feeding trough. The modern world prevents us from maximum flourishing, but we can fix that.
The rapidly expanding paleo community is a reflection of, or reaction to, domestication culture. The bad thing about the paleo movement is the incessant and myopic focus on diet and exercise as if those are the beginning and end of a great lifestyle. There’s already a huge amount of paleo diet info circulating just beneath the surface of popular culture. I’ll inevitably end up repeating some of it. Maybe I’ll have some less obvious insights. But! The rabbit hole goes deeper than diet and excercise. Much deeper.
The melding of anthropology and evolutionary psychology/biology proved so powerful to me that my entire view of the way the world works was simultaneously destroyed and brought into focus almost completely. The logical frameworks forced me to re-read half of my favorite books in order to understand them in this new light. This was true of everything from Debord to Baudrillard to Ogilvy to Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, and Sahlins. It also ingrained in me a new system of analysis when reading things for the first time. I find myself consistently noticing ill-conceived ideas in the context of Neo-Hobbesian, Pre-Man-the-Hunter, Pre-Darwin, Pre-Origin of Species, or Pre-Descent of Man. This may be understandable for writings that predate Darwin and modern anthropology, but much of the thought of the 20th century was practiced with Post-Origin of Species logic and Hobbesian mythology. The amount of great thinking that’s a little bit wrong at its genesis and dramatically wrong at its conclusions because of this error is astounding. It can be seen in the work of Marshall McLuhan, Steven Pinker and countless others.
The bottom line is this: among the regrettably small percentage (anything less than 100% is regrettable) of people who believe in evolution, do not correctly understand it. And most who understand it are working from a debunked set of cultural assumptions.
Evolvify
… Now with triple redundancy!
e-volve [ih-volv]
-verb (imperative tense)
1. to change or develop gradually.
–verb (passive)
2. natural process of adaptive development between states.
-ify
-verbal suffix
3. to “cause to be”, “to make”, “to become”, “be made”.
In other words, “evolve” is my charge to you, “to evolve” is the colloquial description of what happens to everything through time, and converting it to “evolvify” amplifies both iterations of the verb imperatively and transformationally.
Yes, “change over time” is a horrible way to think of Darwinian evolution, but that’s the way it’s often used, so maybe we can at least cause some thought or discussion on the matter.
