Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think (Taming the Mammoth)We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. Part 1: Meet Your Mammoth. The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and within an hour, she was everything to me. When you’re seven, there aren’t really any actionable steps you can take when you’re in love with someone. You’re not even sure what you want from the situation.

There’s just this amorphous yearning that’s a part of your life, and that’s that. But for me, it became suddenly relevant a few months later, when during recess one day, one of the girls in the class started asking each of the boys, “Who do youuu want to marry?” When she asked me, it was a no- brainer. I was finished. Life was over. The news quickly got back to Alana herself, who stayed as far away from me as possible for days after.

If she knew what a restraining order was, she’d have taken one out. This horrifying experience taught me a critical life lesson—it can be mortally dangerous to be yourself, and you should exercise extreme social caution at all times. Now this sounds like something only a traumatized second grader would think, but the weird thing, and the topic of this post, is that this lesson isn’t just limited to me and my debacle of a childhood—it’s a defining paranoia of the human species. We share a collective insanity that pervades human cultures throughout the world: An irrational and unproductive obsession with what other people think of us. Evolution does everything for a reason, and to understand the origin of this particular insanity, let’s back up for a minute to 5. BC in Ethiopia, where your Great.

Grandfather lived as part of a small tribe. Back then, being part of a tribe was critical to survival. A tribe meant food and protection in a time when neither was easy to come by. So for your Great.

Grandfather, almost nothing in the world was more important than being accepted by his fellow tribe members, especially those in positions of authority. Fitting in with those around him and pleasing those above him meant he could stay in the tribe, and about the worst nightmare he could imagine would be people in the tribe starting to whisper about how annoying or unproductive or weird he was—because if enough people disapproved of him, his ranking within the tribe would drop, and if it got really bad, he’d be kicked out altogether and left for dead. He also knew that if he ever embarrassed himself by pursuing a girl in the tribe and being rejected, she’d tell the other girls about it—not only would he have blown his chance with that girl, but he might never have a mate at all now because every girl that would ever be in his life knew about his lame, failed attempt. Being socially accepted was everything. Because of this, humans evolved an over- the- top obsession with what others thought of them—a craving for social approval and admiration, and a paralyzing fear of being disliked. Let’s call that obsession a human’s Social Survival Mammoth.

Review of "Sea Change," by Steve Ringman and Craig Welch, Seattle Times. Review of "The Course of Their Lives," by Mark Johnson and Rick Wood, Milwaukee. Loved this post and how you incorporated your previous anthropomorphisms in it, Hungry Hippo, Anxious Ostrich and friends are great additions to the human emotional.

It looks something like this: Your Great. Grandfather’s Social Survival Mammoth was central to his ability to endure and thrive. It was simple—keep the mammoth well fed with social approval and pay close attention to its overwhelming fears of nonacceptance, and you’ll be fine. And that was all well and fine in 5. BC. And 3. 0,0. 00. BC. And 1. 0,0. 00.

• Introduction. Science Content Standards for California Public Schools, Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve.
• The medical profession should play a central role in evaluating the evidence related to drugs, devices, and procedures for the detection, management, and prevention.

Programming of Life 2: Earth Conspiracy - 37 min - . The Secret Life of Chaos Science - 60 min. Clinical features of disease in patients with chikungunya virus infection (A) Active symmetric synovitis in the metacarpophalangeal and proximal. The most commonly accepted location of the root of the tree of life is between a monophyletic domain Bacteria and a clade formed by Archaea and Eukaryota of what is.

BC. But something funny has happened for humans in the last 1. Sudden, quick change is something civilization has the ability to do, and the reason that can be awkward is that our evolutionary biology can’t move nearly as fast. So while for most of history, both our social structure and our biology evolved and adjusted at a snail’s pace together, civilization has recently developed the speed capabilities of a hare while our biology has continued snailing along.

Our bodies and minds are built to live in a tribe in 5. BC, which leaves modern humans with a number of unfortunate traits, one of which is a fixation with tribal- style social survival in a world where social survival is no longer a real concept. We’re all here in 2. BC. Why else would you try on four outfits and still not be sure what to wear before going out? The mammoth’s nightmares about romantic rejection made your ancestors cautious and savvy, but in today’s world, it just makes you a coward: And don’t even get the mammoth started on the terror of artistic risks: The mammoth’s hurricane of fear of social disapproval plays a factor in most parts of most people’s lives. It’s what makes you feel weird about going to a restaurant or a movie alone; it’s what makes parents care a little too much about where their child goes to college; it’s what makes you pass up a career you’d love in favor of a more lucrative career you’re lukewarm about; it’s what makes you get married before you’re ready to a person you’re not in love with. And while keeping your highly insecure Social Survival Mammoth feeling calm and safe takes a lot of work, that’s only one half of your responsibilities.

The mammoth also needs to be fed regularly and robustly—with praise, approval, and the feeling of being on the right side of any social or moral dichotomy. Why else would you be such an image- crafting douchebag on Facebook? Or brag when you’re out with friends even though you always regret it later? Society has evolved to accommodate this mammoth- feeding frenzy, inventing things like accolades and titles and the concept of prestige in order to keep our mammoths satisfied—and often to incentivize people to do meaningless jobs and live unfulfilling lives they wouldn’t otherwise consider taking part in.

Above all, mammoths want to fit in—that’s what tribespeople had always needed to do so that’s how they’re programmed. Mammoths look around at society to figure out what they’re supposed to do, and when it becomes clear, they jump right in. Just look at any two college fraternity pictures taken ten years apart: Or all those subcultures where every single person has one of the same three socially- acceptable advanced degrees: Sometimes, a mammoth’s focus isn’t on wider society as much as it’s on winning the approval of a Puppet Master in your life. A Puppet Master is a person or group of people whose opinion matters so much to you that they’re essentially running your life. A Puppet Master is often a parent, or maybe your significant other, or sometimes an alpha member of your group of friends. A Puppet Master can be a person you look up to who you don’t know very well—maybe even a celebrity you’ve never met—or a group of people you hold in especially high regard. We crave the Puppet Master’s approval more than anyone’s, and we’re so horrified at the thought of upsetting the Puppet Master or feeling their nonacceptance or ridicule that we’ll do anything to avoid it.

When we get to this toxic state in our relationship with a Puppet Master, that person’s presence hangs over our entire decision- making process and pulls the strings of our opinions and our moral voice. With so much thought and energy dedicated to the mammoth’s needs, you often end up neglecting someone else in your brain, someone all the way at the center—your Authentic Voice. Your Authentic Voice, somewhere in there, knows all about you. In contrast to the black- and- white simplicity of the Social Survival Mammoth, your Authentic Voice is complex, sometimes hazy, constantly evolving, and unafraid. Your AV has its own, nuanced moral code, formed by experience, reflection, and its own personal take on compassion and integrity. It knows how you feel deep down about things like money and family and marriage, and it knows which kinds of people, topics of interest, and types of activities you truly enjoy, and which you don’t.

Religion for the Nonreligious - Wait But Why. The mind. But are you wiser? You get a job, achieve things at the job, gain responsibility, get paid more, move to a better company, gain even more responsibility, get paid even more, rent an apartment with a parking spot, stop doing your own laundry, and you buy one of those $9 juices where the stuff settles down to the bottom. But are you happier?

You do all kinds of life things—you buy groceries, read articles, get haircuts, chew things, take out the trash, buy a car, brush your teeth, shit, sneeze, shave, stretch, get drunk, put salt on things, have sex with someone, charge your laptop, jog, empty the dishwasher, walk the dog, buy a couch, close the curtains, button your shirt, wash your hands, zip your bag, set your alarm, fix your hair, order lunch, act friendly to someone, watch a movie, drink apple juice, and put a new paper towel roll on the thing. But as you do these things day after day and year after year, are you improving as a human in a meaningful way? In the last post, I described the way my own path had led me to be an atheist—but how in my satisfaction with being proudly nonreligious, I never gave serious thought to an active approach to internal improvement—hindering my own evolution in the process. This wasn’t just my own naivet. Society at large focuses on shallow things, so it doesn’t stress the need to take real growth seriously.

The major institutions in the spiritual arena—religions—tend to focus on divinity over people, making salvation the end goal instead of self- improvement. The industries that do often focus on the human condition—philosophy, psychology, art, literature, self- help, etc.—lie more on the periphery, with their work often fragmented from each other. All of this sets up a world that makes it hard to treat internal growth as anything other than a hobby, an extra- curricular, icing on the life cake. Considering that the human mind is an ocean of complexity that creates every part of our reality, working on what’s going on in there seems like it should be a more serious priority.

In the same way a growing business relies on a clear mission with a well thought- out strategy and measurable metrics, a growing human needs a plan—if we want to meaningfully improve, we need to define a goal, understand how to get there, become aware of obstacles in the way, and have a strategy to get past them. When I dove into this topic, I thought about my own situation and whether I was improving.

The efforts were there—apparent in many of this blog’s post topics—but I had no growth model, no real plan, no clear mission. Just kind of haphazard attempts at self- improvement in one area or another, whenever I happened to feel like it.

So I’ve attempted to consolidate my scattered efforts, philosophies, and strategies into a single framework—something solid I can hold onto in the future—and I’m gonna use this post to do a deep dive into it. So settle in, grab some coffee, and get your brain out and onto the table in front of you—you’ll want to have it there to reference as we explore what a weird, complicated object it is. More on that later. How Do We Get to the Goal? By being aware of the truth. When I say “the truth,” I’m not being one of those annoying people who says the word truth to mean some amorphous, mystical thing—I’m just referring to the actual facts of reality.

The truth is a combination of what we know and what we don’t know—and gaining and maintaining awareness of both sides of this reality is the key to being wise. Easy, right? We don’t have to know more than we know, we only have to be aware of what we know and what we don’t know.

Truth is in plain sight, written on the whiteboard—we just have to look at the board and reflect upon it. There’s just this one thing—What’s in Our Way? The fog. To understand the fog, let’s first be clear that we’re not here: We’re here: And this isn’t the situation: This is: This is a really hard concept for humans to absorb, but it’s the starting place for growth. Declaring ourselves “conscious” allows us to call it a day and stop thinking about it.

I like to think of it as a consciousness staircase: An ant is more conscious than a bacterium, a chicken more than an ant, a monkey more than a chicken, and a human more than a monkey. But what’s above us? A) Definitely something, and B) Nothing we can understand better than a monkey can understand our world and how we think. There’s no reason to think the staircase doesn’t extend upwards forever. The red alien a few steps above us on the staircase would see human consciousness the same way we see that of an orangutan—they might think we’re pretty impressive for an animal, but that of course we don’t actually begin to understand anything. Our most brilliant scientist would be outmatched by one of their toddlers. To the green alien up there higher on the staircase, the red alien might seem as intelligent and conscious as a chicken seems to us.

And when the green alien looks at us, it sees the simplest little pre- programmed ants. We can’t conceive of what life higher on the staircase would be like, but absorbing the fact that higher stairs exist and trying to view ourselves from the perspective of one of those steps is the key mindset we need to be in for this exercise. For now, let’s ignore those much higher steps and just focus on the step right above us—that light green step. A species on that step might think of us like we think of a three- year- old child—emerging into consciousness through a blur of simplicity and naivet. Let’s imagine that a representative from that species was sent to observe humans and report back to his home planet about them—what would he think of the way we thought and behaved?

What about us would impress him? What would make him cringe? I think he’d very quickly see a conflict going on in the human mind. Download Most Security Off Patch Volvo S60 there. On one hand, all of those steps on the staircase below the human are where we grew from. Hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary adaptations geared toward animal survival in a rough world are very much rooted in our DNA, and the primitive impulses in us have birthed a bunch of low- grade qualities—fear, pettiness, jealousy, greed, instant- gratification, etc.

Those qualities are the remnants of our animal past and still a prominent part of our brains, creating a zoo of small- minded emotions and motivations in our heads: But over the past six million years, our evolutionary line has experienced a rapid growth in consciousness and the incredible ability to reason in a way no other species on Earth can. We’ve taken a big step up the consciousness staircase, very quickly—let’s call this burgeoning element of higher consciousness our Higher Being. The Higher Being is brilliant, big- thinking, and totally rational. But on the grand timescale, he’s a very new resident in our heads, while the primal animal forces are ancient, and their coexistence in the human mind makes it a strange place: So it’s not that a human is the Higher Being and the Higher Being is three years old—it’s that a human is the combination of the Higher Being and the low- level animals, and they blend into the three- year- old that we are.

The Higher Being alone would be a more advanced species, and the animals alone would be one far more primitive, and it’s their particular coexistence that makes us distinctly human. As humans evolved and the Higher Being began to wake up, he looked around your brain and found himself in an odd and unfamiliar jungle full of powerful primitive creatures that didn’t understand who or what he was. His mission was to give you clarity and high- level thought, but with animals tramping around his work environment, it wasn’t an easy job. And things were about to get much worse.