Yesterday’s post was all about accepting your caveman: that part of you that evolved over all those thousands of generations before fossil fuels ignited the industrial revolution. 

This is a critical step because, if you understand and accept your caveman, it suddenly becomes much easier to accept yourself. 

All those self-destructive cravings, embarrassing insecurities, irresponsible procrastinations, pent-up frustrations and baseless worries are happening for an easily understandable reason: society has changed completely over the past 0.1% of human history, leaving most of our natural emotional responses totally outdated. 

This doesn’t make you a bad person. It just means that you, like the rest of us, are a caveman stuck in the future.  

Fighting your caveman

Most of the problems in today’s world arise because we’re fighting our cavemen. All this fighting drains our energy, making us unproductive and prone to worry, frustration and self-destructive cravings. This, in turn, creates insecurities and low self-image that strengthen the vicious cycle.

Our weapon of choice for fighting our cavemen is willpower. As you have seen many times before, your caveman will always win this fight. He will wear you down and mercilessly unleash the Big Five when all your willpower is exhausted. 

There are many senseless wars in the world, but this daily war that each of us fights with him or herself may be the most senseless of them all. 

We need to stop. We need to make peace. 

Accepting your caveman

So, I hope we can all agree that fighting your caveman is useless. It’s almost like falling asleep – the harder you try, the lower your chances of success. 

No, the best way to live well in today’s world is to accept your caveman. Go on your emotion safaris. Gradually introduce the Great Five positive emotions into your life. And patiently build some intelligent environments where good things happen automatically.

Your caveman is an inseparable part of you. Working together is the only option.  

Accepting yourself

Like any relationship, your rational consciousness and your primitive self will never be in perfect harmony. There will always be the occasional conflict. There will always  be times when you let yourself down.

But even though we can never reach perfection, we can always get better. Every day presents another chance to increase the balance between the Big Five and the Great Five in your mental ecosystem. 

This balance is the key to that mythical ideal of “inner peace”.  

And when you stop wasting all that mental energy on your inner wars, you will be open to something much more interesting: understanding and accepting other peoples’ cavemen. 

But that is tomorrow’s topic. See you then!