The Primitives

[peterbirks]

We humans are primitive beings really. Probably 99% of what we do is in some way hard-wired back to neolithic days or earlier. What would surprise a truly alien visitor to this small rather irrelevant planet would not be how different humanity is from the rest of the animal kingdom, but how similar we are. I mean, suppose they were sentient beings, but moved on a really slow personal timescale. We would move around too fast for them to be able to see us, and they would probably spend several decades attempting to communicate with the plants.

But, I digress. As I said, we are simple things, and one of the aspects most hard-wired into us is the concept of "reward". We do unpleasant things because we see the prospect of a pleasant thing as the end result of doing those unpleasant things. That could be something as simple as sitting at home watching your baby grow up. Or, even simpler, the prospect of getting blind-laggingly drunk on a Friday night.

Indeed, one of the difficulties of giving up drinking (or, so I am told, heroin) is that your life was built around this latter short-term work/reward dichotomy. By removing one of the pillars (the drinking/reward part), you lost any motive for the former.

My trouble at the moment is not that I don't have "reward" concepts in mind, but that the reward is so mind-bogglingly long term that it's easy to lose sight of it. There is a big shift from "if I do this, I can get drunk tonight" to "if I do this, that is one fraction towards a life of leisure in 10 years' time".

Of course, that I can think in those terms at all is in itself mind-bogglingly amazing. Most of the population have to work because they have already spent that money and are now paying off the debt (and the interest). Not so much delayed gratification or instant gratification, as gratification in advance.

Comments

Re: A good distraction from the decorating

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

No, this wasn't meant to be an intellectual justification. It just happened to be something I could associate with. Drinking (like heroin) eventually reaches the stage where the "reward" is non-existent. But, for a lot of people (witness the pub on a Friday night) this is part of the "reward" process. Call it "going out on a Friday night" if you like (thus getting rid of the alcohol-connotation). It could equally be "having dinner with someone you love" or "going to the opera". The point of my post related to the concept of reward, rather than the specifics entailed. I have no desire to get blind-laggingly drunk on a Friday night. I would rather be sitting at home watching my kid grow up (which is, perhaps, why I mentioned this first).

This is a problem related to age, I think, rather than to me specifically. When you are young, lots of things are exciting. As you get older, well, you've done most of those things, so you need rather larger things to get you excited. Now I've reached the stage where I can't even get excited by the concept of buying a new car. Now, buying another house, that's interesting. But, like I said, even though it's very easy to make a lot of money when your sole focus in life is making a lot of money, getting a quarter of a million quid in cash together just to "generate a bit of excitement" is a bit of a tall order.

Actually, I'm not really sure what I am getting at here, apart from the rather tedious point that, as one gets older, it's harder to find aything that surprises/excites/impresses.

Well, that's hardly an earth-shattering revelation, is it?

Re: A good distraction from the decorating

[simonbillenness.livejournal.com]

Did you just say: "I would rather be sitting at home watching my kid grow up...?"

Did I somehow miss the fact that you have reproduced?

Re: A good distraction from the decorating

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

No. Or, as the old joke goes. "Not as far as I am aware".

Came close a couple of times, though.