Why is our stress system more suited for “getting attacked by lions” than modern financial worries?
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Easy. Lions will LITERALLY kill you and tear you to pieces. You will be dead, and in a very painful and miserable way. Financial worries? Merely an inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. It’s not a literal life-and-limb risk. As far as your body goes, it’s a tiny speedbump.
The most ELI5 way of putting it: the human body is designed for acute stress, chronic stress is harmful.
The human body uses certain chemicals, like cortisol and adrenaline, to prepare itself for stressful situations. We are designed to sustain acute spikes of these chemicals, their chronic presence in our systems is harmful at a multitude of different levels, creating stress-related problems.
We have been running from predators before mamals were a thing, finance just has been a thing for a few generations
People generally worry about things that could kill them quickly (lions, sharks, guns, car accidents, etc) than things that will kill then slowly (stress, smoking, sedentary lifestyles, etc).
A lion attacks you once, briefly, and either kills you or gives up because you hit it with a big stick. Hit it hard enough and it’ll never try again.
Your bank account attacks you constantly, every minute of every hour of every day, and the only way to stop it is to die.
Well think about it; getting attacked by lions was a lot more serious than spending all your rocks.
Modern financial stress can be likened to the communal stress most of us feel along with anxiety about resource acquisition.
Humans are social creatures, and most of us naturally feel compelled to “fit in” as a functional member of society. In modern society, you need money to fit in.
Humans also need food, water, and shelter, and most of us feel compelled to seek and secure those fundamental necessities for future consumption/use. In modern society, you need money to buy food, access safe drinking water, and afford shelter.
Basically, we took all the things that cause stress, solved them all, and then decided we would then use this thing called “money” to decide who we allow to access it. So money causes all the stresses.
If a lion was stalking you every waking hour im pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to handle that either.
Thats basicly whats happening now, we have mild worries, all the time, and our bodies isnt really equipped with a varying degrees of worry response. It has one panik button, and pressing tha button all the time isnt healthy.
Industrial Revolution – leading to modern way of life – in progress around 1800. Current year 2023. Number of human generations for current adults approximately 7-9.
Much less than this in parts of the world that industrialized later. Chinese industrialization is still within living memory.
Evolution works on a scale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Extreme pressures can cause faster change (e.g. tuskless elephants, immunity to high lethality disease) but until overreacting to financial threats is actually *killing* people before they can raise offspring, it’s not even a pressure.
Our ancestors spent hundreds of thousands of years getting attacked by lions, only a few thousand dealing with economics and only a couple hundred dealing with modern capitalism
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