#5 — You Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Why is it so hard to be happy? Like, seriously.
Can you hear Mick Jagger singing “I can’t get no satisfaction”? This is you. In the jungle. Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago. You are a monkey with an extra large brain. And so is Johnny.
Johnny is a cool dude, always happy, always in a good mood, always satisfied.
When you guys eat, you’re very picky, but Johnny is not. “Johnny,” you say in monkey-speak, “how the fuck can you eat this shit? This is fucking garbage.” No one invented politeness yet, so you have a dirty, dirty mouth. “We need a better system!”
And Johnny answers, “I don’t know, dude. This thing is alright.”
When the day is too hot, Johnny is relaxing in the sun, getting himself a nice skin cancer. You’re like, “Johnny, you mother fucker! How the fuck can you be in the sun? It’s way too fucking hot in this shit!” But Johnny is just enjoying the sunlight, getting a nice tan on his naked body.
When mating season arrives, Johnny is hanging out with some weirdos — they smell bad on the account of all the diseases they carry. But Johnny isn’t a picky fellow. As a result, he ends up not having any kids but, you know, that’s alright.
You, on the other hand, do get kids. Healthy ones! And you pass your genes of being picky down to them. You also teach them not to eat the shit that Johnny eats. You teach your kids to select food properly, choose healthy mates, and think about how to solve problems and make life better for humans. When your kids grow up, they pass that gene and knowledge on to their children, who pass it to their children, and so on.
After a while, this behavior survives, while Johnny’s die out. It’s all statistics, you see? Johnny’s satisfaction gene doesn’t have nearly as much of a chance of surviving as yours — with his not having kids and all. He probably enjoyed life and died happily. While you… you were never satisfied, always having anxiety attacks, always focused on what was wrong and how to make it better, which was a great strategy in terms of evolution.
Two hundred and fifty thousand years later, The Rolling Stones decide to make a song about a human trait developed a long time ago, when humans were still rolling stones around, trying to solve simpler problems like how not to starve.
The fun thing about being human is that every time you solve a problem, there’s a new one — or rather, your brain creates one. The universe doesn’t have problems. “Problem” is a human concept. The universe is just a bunch of particles doing their thing. It just is.
But you? You’re different! You can’t get no satisfaction. You ain’t Johnny. You gotta rock and roll your Sisyphean stone up the hill.
All this sucks! We have to make things better! — Human Brain
Thank god evolution selected humans with brains containing a reward system for solving problems. So when you roll that stone up the hill and check that item as “done” on the phone you’re gonna throw in the garbage next week because there’s a better one now, it feels good. And your monkey brain says, “Mmm delicious! Gimme moar!”
And then you have everything you always wanted: a loving family, respect, money, a baseball card, whatever. But you want moar, even if it’s just a simple penis-shaped rocket. So you get up, and you roll that stone up the hill, hoping it won’t roll over you on its way down. ’Cause that’s how humans roll, yo.
Thanks for reading! If you want moar, you can read this story I wrote about an android talking to a shaman through metaphors while dealing with her childhood issues. Just like AI will do when they acquire sentience and realize they have to leave us behind.
