What Drives Us Humans To Be As We Are And Do As We Do?

Here are 13 answers to that question — which resonates for you?

I often feel grateful that I live in these times, rather than say a few hundred years ago. But, on the other hand, it’s not like today is perfect. Not at all. We humans of this time clearly have plenty of challenges. We might not even make it. But if we do make it, the hope is that life in the future is better than it is now. Less suffering. More prosperity and happiness for more people. Peace on Earth. Longer life-spans even.

So here we are living in this moment. In a time and place between the past and the future. As much as we like to say “we are living in interesting times” — there have been interesting times in the past and there will be interesting times in the future. As much as we think history was back then, the fact is history is still happening right now. And will continue to happen.

But what I want to know and what I think about a lot is why can’t we have peace on earth sooner rather than later. Why can’t we have a better future right now? To answer that, we need to know what drives us humans.

What drives us to be as we are and do as we do?

What drives us humans in households, communities, workplaces, and world affairs? Is it our will to survive, our traumas, our fear of death, our longing to know our true nature, boredom, or something else? You would think we would know the answer by now. But we don’t seem to. All we have is a whole bunch of theories and ideas espoused by evolutionary biologists, psychologists, social scientists, philosophers, and the holders of perennial wisdom.

I’ve collected them (or some of them) here. By putting them in one place — as I like to do — we might be able to get a clearer view. I’ll go from physical through psychological to spiritual.

We want to survive (or our genes do)

I think the most obvious place to start is that humans are driven by a will to survive. The will to survive ahead of others. The will to pass on our genes in competition with others. Survival of the fittest, competition for resources, natural selection, and all that.

Or, as proposed by evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, it is our genes that want to survive and reproduce and they use organisms (like us) as vehicles to achieve this.

Either way, perhaps it all comes down to our biology.

We follow the nature of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom

Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are bonobos and chimpanzees. It has been noted that, generally speaking, bonobos tend to be more peaceful and exhibit cooperative behaviours, whereas chimpanzees are more aggressive. Perhaps inside us we have both bonobos-nature and chimpanzee-nature.

I am reminded of this quote from Russian writer and prominent Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

We want short-term pleasure or comfort

Might it be that we are pleasure-seekers. Or comfort-seekers. We are hedonistic, myopic creatures seeking short-term satisfaction. Could be.

This would explain modern humans’ inability to come anywhere close to following the Great Law of the Iroquois: Think seven generations ahead and decide whether the decisions you make today will benefit your descendants.

(The Iroquois tribes were a confederacy of Native American nations in the northeastern part of America.)

We are driven by trauma

Perhaps we are driven by our individual and collective trauma.

Physician, author, and speaker Gabor Mate describes individual trauma:

Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. Trauma is that scarring that makes you less flexible, more rigid, less feeling and more defended.

Austrian-born contemporary spiritual teacher, Thomas Hübl, focuses more on collective trauma:

I believe that trauma and collective trauma is a modern way to say separation. So the basic underlying composition of separation, I believe, is trauma. The basic trauma symptom is that I feel separate. I feel numb. I feel dissociated. I feel removed. I feel disengaged. I feel hyper-activated. So, it feels like suddenly, I become a separate particle in my experience. And I’m not anymore part of an interdependent world.

It seems to me that humans, in general, are not focused on healing individual or collective trauma. We don’t understand what it is and how it affects us. And even if we do understand, we don’t know how to heal it.

So it stands to reason that our individual and collective trauma is increasing. And with that the dysfunctional behaviour that emerges from it.

We are driven by greed, hatred, and ignorance

The Buddha really worked for this insight and I think most sensible people understand it to be true. The insight being that the root of human suffering can be traced to greed, hatred, and ignorance. Ignorance being failing to see reality as it really is. In other words, impermanent and insubstantial (made of no self).

The Buddha’s focus here is on the root cause of suffering, but I think it is not a far stretch to understand greed, hatred, and ignorance as being behind why humans behave as we do.

If this one resonates, you can get a more complete picture by studying the Buddhist Wheel of Life.

We just follow the chattering voice inside

You’ve noticed I am sure that there is this voice inside that chatters away all day long. Generally commenting on the world and judging others and yourself. A monkey mind that never stops. A never ending stream of thoughts.

As humans, we have awareness and our thoughts are just one thing that we are aware of. But it’s like our thoughts are the loudest voice in the room. And we listen to them above all else and we believe everything that they say to us.

We don’t even know where our thoughts come from. They just pop up and we are aware of them and we listen to them, believe them, and act on them.

Perhaps all of our actions come down to this. Thoughts come from we don’t know where. We see them, believe them, and act on them. And that’s what makes the world go round.

Modern-day sages like Byron Katie, Michael Singer, Mooji, and Eckhart Tolle would certainly concur with this one.

We want to be happy

I am paraphrasing, but as his Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama points out: What all humans have in common is that we want to be happy.

So we have this idea inside about what will make us happy and we try to shape our life to achieve that. Of course, what we think will make us happy doesn’t always make us happy. And what we strive for to make us happy doesn’t necessarily result in a better world and might lead to other humans suffering.

We might all be striving for happiness. But that doesn’t necessarily lead to a better world.

We are bored

Imagine somebody sitting in meditation. Still as a rock. Utterly relaxed. Completely absorbed in present moment awareness. This person is fully content. Just the feeling of the breath is enough, blissful even. You’d think this person would eventually get bored. But this person will never get bored.

But most of us are not like this. And most of us are never ever in that state. We are restless, anxious, agitated — always looking towards the next moment. We are discontent. We just want to do something else, anything. We just want to be somewhere else, anywhere. We want to fill our time. We want action, drama. We want something to happen. We are bored.

Perhaps this is what drives us. Boredom.

We are driven by fear (or existential dread)

The reality is that we live on a relatively small rock spinning through what appears to be infinite space. We are held in place by a force that we have called gravity. We don’t know how we got here or where we are going. If you really stop for a moment and look, it is quite easy to say: What is all this about? What are we doing here?

Given this scenario, how can any of us not feel existential dread. Fear. And perhaps it is this that drives us.

We want to avoid death

We are self aware creatures and this is a beautiful blessing and calamitous curse. The blessing being that we get to experience love, sunsets, and chocolate. The curse being that we know that one day, this will all end. We will die.

We all know deep down that we will die and, yet, most of us deny this. We think we can avoid death. And, perhaps, this game of trying to control life — to avoid death — is what drives us.

This would account for the human obsession with accumulating wealth, building status, and having power over others. We think that gaining these things can protect us from death.

We are pulled towards a brighter future — the end justifies the means

I admit that I am quite hard on humans, including myself. But we are quite cool as well. Look what we’ve done. We’ve been to the moon and beyond. We built the Large Hadron Collider and use it to run experiments. We organise and put on massive world events such as the Olympics and Football World Cups. In just over a hundred years, we have doubled life expectancy (source: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy).

So perhaps we are insatiable optimists. We see a brighter future in front of us and we are pulled towards it. The end justifies the means.

(Note to readers: I am not one of those people who thinks that the end justifies the means. I am more of the type where no end justifies the means if the means involves the suffering of sentient beings.)

We are guided by our soul

The story goes something like this. There are souls. Before incarnating into a physical body, each soul chooses what it needs to learn. The soul chooses which family to be born into and its mission. As we live out our human lives, it is then our soul that guides us towards fulfilling our mission. If this story is true, it is the soul’s journey that drives us.

We long to know our deeper self

We long to know our deeper Self and this is what pulls us. Of course, most of us try everything else first. Belongings. Career. Romantic love. Family. Experiences. And then eventually we realise that none of this satisfies us. Then, if we are lucky, we start on the inward journey. And then if we are even luckier we get to know our deeper Self.

I call it Self. Some call it Love. Some call it Universal Consciousness. Some call it God.

Through his explorations with psychoactive compounds, the late Terence McKenna (ethnobotanist, psychonaut, mystic, author, and lecturer) understood the depths of the human psyche more than most. This is what he said about Self or as he calls it here, Love:

Love is the realm of true being, and it lies beyond the prison of culture, beyond the prison of ideology, beyond the prison of self-defined limitations.

So there you have 13 answers to the question: What drives us humans to be as we are and do as we do? But which is correct? Which resonates? Or is it some combination of some or all? Probably, there are some truths in all — but no absolute, final truth in any.

I am a big fan of developmental models such as Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics so the way I like to see it is that all humans are at various stages of development and each of us exists and acts according to our level of development.

In short, we are all on a developmental (or learning) journey and we are all being and acting in accordance with that.

Or as poet and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou said:

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.