A HUGE source of all of our problems, as humans, is that we’re living in a modern society with a caveman brain.
We’d lived in small groups of 200-300 people for hundreds of thousands of years, and during that time developed some incredible instincts and unconscious and automatic behaviors perfectly suited for that environment.
But our post agricultural society, where we’ve got millions of people living in the same spot, rather than a couple hundred folks continuously wandering the countryside, a lot of these instincts don’t work so well.
For example, if you didn’t have a HUGE and unconscious desire to follow the crowd, you would certainly have perished.
Similarly, if you weren’t automatically swayed by the authority figures, you wouldn’t have fared well either.
In today’s modern society, blindly following the crowd or any leader without conscious thought can get you into trouble.
Entire societies have been driven to the verge of extinction because evil men leveraged these two tendencies in men.
How hard is it to ignore your instincts? Sometimes incredibly hard. Consider trying to lose weight. Your caveman brain is screaming at you to eat as much as possible, but your conscious mind knows full well that if you grab a burger every single time you pass a Micky D’s, there’s gonna be trouble.
What can we do?
If you leave it up to your caveman brain, you may succeed, but then again, you may crash and burn in a huge ball of flames.
A better option would be to take some time, with your conscious mind, and choose what you want out of a life. Every time your inner caveman (or cavewoman) starts screaming for attention, consider how what they want compares to what you want.
Ideally, you’d want your caveman on your side, since your instincts are a powerful force. Harness them and it’s literally impossible not to succeed.
Just remember to lead your caveman, not the other way around.