"Evolution Played A Dirty Trick On Us" - Why Modern Life Feels So Empty - William von Hippel

The western world simply has too many distractions it interferes with our true sense of being. I remember when i was 18 I spent a year travelling Africa living in a tent. The longer I was away the more I forgot my past life’s complications and the more I became more in tune with who I really was.

Well, *that* name perked up my ears -- I did a quick search and, yep, I graduated high school with Bill von Hippel! 😀

It is easy to be happy if life can end at any moment. What we call trauma now, used to be regular life for our evolutionary ancestors. Every now and then a predator got a parent. A child. A sibling. When you know you can die at nay moment, it becomes easier to not worry about the abstract. And I fully believe that the freedom to worry about the future also causes almost all of the stress and the unhappiness. If your biggest worry is your next meal, a successful hunt or the discovery of a lot of root vegetables takes away the worry for days on end. It is a very concrete issue that gets solved in a very concrete way, with a mechanism (being satiated) that your body is absolutely primed to reward. If your worry is a deadline at work which requires you to analyse the records of the last year to file the best tax return that will have to be done in 1.5 months, that's 45 days of stress. With the stress ever increasing unless you're ahead of schedule. You're never just relaxed. Everything is abstract and everything will just be replaced by the next abstract issue. And your body has no way to reward you for making the deadline. Your body does not understand accounting and tax law.

Nice, I recognise that face, made me realise how long I've been watching this channel. 🙏

Hello you savages. Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Here's the timestamps: 00:00 Why We Aren’t Happier When We Have Everything 11:01 Connection Through an Evolutionary Lens 20:36 What Drove Hunter-Gatherers to Connect? 25:16 How Materialistic Were Hunter-Gatherers? 29:58 How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Networks 32:09 Tensions Between Competence & Warmth 40:47 Which Historical Periods Prioritised Connection? 49:22 The Forces That Shape Autonomy & Connection 57:23 Why We’re Off-Balance in Modern Society 1:06:14 Society’s Worship of Individualism 1:12:34 Does Marriage Fulfil Our Need for Connection? 1:16:46 Why Anxiety is So Prevalent Today 1:18:26 How to Find a Better Balance 1:29:45 Where to Find William

This guy is awesome! Thanks so much for having him on again Chris!

I feel like I am a pretty happy person as a whole. I have a loving husband and three kids who I am so proud of. I try to eat well, exercise, and get enough sleep. One huge thing I have noticed is that when there is a magnificent sunset, nobody is outside looking at it. They might notice it-but very few people stop and actually take it in. But it is the same with many beautiful things in life. I feel like appreciating beauty and taking time to notice those things reset my mind. Funny that empathy is usually thought of as on the left politically-I am very empathetic but I am a conservative and I also feel that individual freedoms are very important to a free society.

Morgan Housel i think! In the absence of big problems, people shift their worries to smaller ones. In the absence of small problems, they focus on petty or even imaginary ones.

Not my own ideas, but paraphrasing what I've heard other guests on this and other podcasts say: we also aren't happier because we interact with the world through the filter of our minds and our minds will usually find a level of homeostasis. The outside world can only affect us within the scope that our minds an their chemicals allow. And even then the effects tend to not be symmetrical, the big negative shit will hit us harder and longer than the positive, because how we were evolutionarily wired. Trying to intervene at the chemical level, that is the level of the most proximal variable to the dependent variable, our minds (through food, working out, sleep, meditate) is more likely to affect out happiness than trying to intervene at the more distal variable, that is our life.

Kudos to Chris for asking the question- “evolutionarily speaking, why the need for autonomy?” The guest didn’t answer it, nor did he mention that at least half of humanity doesn’t actually want autonomy, they want security above all else.