Yesterday we took a brief trip through human history. We discovered how dramatically the world has changed over the past 0.1% of human history, leaving many of our instinctive emotional responses badly outdated. 

This post will dig a little deeper into the most important outdated emotions. 

But before we start, I just want to emphasize that emotions certainly are not inherently bad. Things like inspiration, compassion, hope and love are all good. Even the emotions listed below can help in certain cases. 

The problem is just that they are badly out of balance in today’s world. Let me explain what I mean by briefly discussing the Big Five primitive emotions.   

Craving

For 99.9% of human history, getting enough food to survive was very difficult. For this reason, those with the strongest drive to get their hands on food and other consumables survived to pass on their genes. 

After thousands of generations of this natural selection, we’re now stuck with an enormous drive to consume. And today, with material abundance all around us, this is a serious problem. 

Of course, smart entrepreneurs exploit this instinctive drive to the max. Hyper-palatable nutrient-free foods are a prime example of products designed to send this primitive instinct into overdrive.

The obvious result is that most of the rich world is overweight and unhealthy, even though we’re all desperate to be in great shape to satisfy the next primitive instinct.

Ego

For most of human history, rejection from the tribe meant almost certain death. Over the millennia, this led to an overwhelming desire to fit in and gain the respect of our peers.  

The most insidious effect of this primitive instinct is our fear of rejection, which leads to an intense fear of failure or any kind of perceived public embarrassment.

In today’s world of constant change, repeatedly trying new things is mandatory for making progress. Indeed, those who avoid failure cannot grow and, ironically, cannot win the respect of their peer group.

This results in a dangerous vicious cycle where the fear of rejection becomes even stronger, leading to even more avoidance, more stagnation, and less respect from the tribe.  

Sloth

Like most animals, humans are naturally lazy. This is an important instinct we evolved to conserve energy, which was critical for survival over our long history when food was scarce.  

As evidenced by the global obesity epidemic, we certainly no longer have any energy shortage. But our laziness remains. We will still naturally slack off until some other primitive emotional response spurs us into action. This is why we cram everything into the last bit of time before a deadline. 

But this is all wrong in today’s world where we need tons of proactive productive action to achieve real success and fulfillment. Sloth has therefore gone from an important survival mechanism to a huge competitive disadvantage.    

Frustration

Life in the old days was incredibly hard. But it was simple. Therefore, the simple emotions of Frustration and it’s big brother “Anger” became very effective blunt tools for fixing things that were not to our liking. 

Today’s world is totally different. By historical standards, life has become very easy, but also much more complex. This complexity gives us many things to be frustrated about. But the problem is that most of these things are either out of our hands or too complicated to fix with a natural angry response. 

The result is far too many people walking around with loads of pent-up anger and frustration. This serves no useful purpose. It just drains our mental energy and motivation, making it even harder to resist the negative effects of all the other outdated emotions on this page.

Worry

The four primitive emotions discussed thus far all focus on the short term. But our ancestors also faced several threats that required some longer-term planning (e.g. the harsh winter months). 

That’s where Worry emerged as a highly effective survival mechanism. It allowed us to instinctively act on potential threats before they even arrived, greatly increasing our chance of survival. Thus, the best “Worriers” got to pass on their genes. 

Sadly, this useful primitive emotion easily becomes inaccurate and/or overwhelmed in today’s world of great complexity and information overload. As a result, it often drains our mental energy and immobilizes us for no good reason, becoming a major drag on our development.  

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So, these are Big Five primitive emotional responses causing most of the heartache and pain in the developed world today. 

It would be interesting to hear if you can think of a source of unhappiness that cannot be traced back to these five issues. 

Tomorrow, we’ll look at an interesting approach to start dealing with these outdated emotions. See you then!