Why is our stress system more suited for “getting attacked by lions” than modern financial worries?
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Because when we evolved we didn’t have modern financial worries, but we did get eaten by lions.
Humans as a species has spent far far far longer getting attacked by lions than dealing with modern finances.
For hundreds of thousands of years, humans who didn’t stress over possible lions all died. Only those who stress over lions, even too much, were left.
Financial mistakes don’t weed out people nearly as effectively, and even if they did, it hasn’t been long enough.
Because humans have been around far, far, far longer than the idea of “finance” and we’ve spent most of that time having to worry about predators
Because once the lion is gone, the stress is over.
Financial worries lasts months or years and our bodies weren’t built to handle that stress for long periods of time.
We’re well equipped to deal with acute sources of stress. We produce things like adrenaline, can overcome great hardships and our brains craft narratives that let us understand what happened.
Financial stress is chronic. We suck at dealing with chronic stress. Our body tells us to get out of stressful situations and when we can’t it grinds us down.
Evolution!!! Thousands of years of being attacked by lions forced us to adapt or die, modern financial worries are just that modern and not the same through the population.
Evolution takes quite a lot of time. We had like 100 000 years of having to watch out not being eaten – and maybe 100 years of modern financial worries.
It’s the same reason humans were able to exterminate loads of large mammals in the past. They simply did not see us as a thread and were gone long before their mindset evolved to “be carefull of humans”.
Cortisol, the stress hormone, engages fight or flight to a sudden environmental threat. Think, facing a cougar while you’re having a squat or for modernity, swerving to avoid a crash. Cortisol didn’t subscribe for the monotonous monetary social constructs.
Because humans had millions of years to run from lions and a few centuries to worry about money. Evolution hasn’t caught up to the idea that having small numbers on a computer somewhere is more dangerous to us than a large animal eating us.
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