The second Supermorning chapter talked a lot about the primitive emotions that make it so hard to consistently do the things we know are good and healthy. If we’re serious about building a sustainable and equitable global society, we really need to get ourselves to the next level. 

Realizing the grand importance of this personal evolutionary journey makes it a lot easier to make the required mental upgrade. 

Let’s see how this works. 

Our basic primitive emotions

Thanks to the incredible technological and social progress over the last 0.1% of human history, we’re all cavemen stuck in the future. 

Most of our natural emotional responses are well equipped for keeping us alive on the savanna, but less so for keeping us happy and healthy in our amazing modern world of material abundance. 

This is the fundamental driver behind all the most pressing problems the world faces today. 

The first step: Forward-thinking emotions

Most of our primitive emotions drive us towards instant pleasure and away from instant pain. This worked fine for 99.9% of our evolutionary history but falls well short today. 

What we need for individual success in today’s world are emotions that drive us towards long-term pleasure and away from long-term pain. 

Such emotions would ensure perfect healthy eating and exercise habits, financial responsibility, and high productivity. All these things bring bucketloads of long-term pleasure and greatly reduce the chances of experiencing long-term pain. We all know this. But, thanks to our primitive emotions, we just cannot get ourselves to follow through. 

This blog has talked a lot about creating environments where healthy actions happen automatically. In reality, this is just a smart way to trick our primitive short-term emotions into prioritizing our longer-term health, security, and happiness. 

And the very cool thing is that, once you start experiencing the benefits of long-term thinking, you get emotionally involved.

At this point, your emotions start to naturally gravitate towards these long-term benefits. This is the point where your life can really start taking off. It’s also a big reason why there is the 1% and the 99%.  

The second step: Global-thinking emotions

But there is another step. In today’s complex and interconnected world, we not only need to think about our own long-term future but also about that of society. 

A happy, healthy, and productive society makes everyone’s lives better. But there are far too many ways in which we can harm society by pursuing individual gain. 

Climate change and other environmental issues epitomize this point. Those causing the damage are often very different from those feeling it. In the short-term, this does not impact those of us with environmentally destructive lifestyles. But, sooner or later, we’ll pay a very high price. 

This crucial next step of our evolution gets much easier when we understand that a sustainable lifestyle can be synonymous with happiness, health, wealth, and productivity. 

Once you really get into this, your primitive emotions also catch on. Doing good for society then becomes a strong emotional driving force behind the intelligent design of a happy, healthy, wealthy, and productive life. 

When you reach this point, you’ve arrived at the next stage of human evolution 🙂 The future of our planet depends on how quickly the majority of us can reach this point.