How I cured myself with evolutionary psychology

Mural by Charles Sprague Peirce, 1896

Resident Contrarian is feeling depressed and severely stressed - for no obvious reason at all. Been there, done that. And I cured myself with evolutionary psychology.  

When I was a teenager, I was half-crazy. Always only half-crazy. I wondered why I never went crazy for real, because it very often felt like I was going to. But I didn't. No interesting, creative mental illness here. Just the usual: Bouts of non-clinical depression and insomnia. 

I remember precisely when things turned around for me and led me towards my current, mentally healthy state. I was 20 years old and I failed an exam in microeconomics on purpose. Until then, I had tried to do everything right: I studied hard, I had a part-time job, I went to the gym regularly, tried to dress well enough and all-around be a well-behaved 20 year old woman. 

Then I started doing things wrong. Demonstratively wrong. I dropped out of university. I had a child when I was 21 and then I had another. I got a part-time job with no career prospects. Then we moved to a run-down countryside house close to the dilapidated small town where I grew up. 

For every "wrong" move, my professional outlooks tumbled to a lower level. And yet I felt better than ever. The deep psychological discomfort I had thought was a part of my personality just disappeared. 

Let evolution lead you

When I purposefully ruined my professional chances I didn't explicitly think of evolutionary psychology. But the longer I lead this kind of life, the more I attribute my unexpected road to mental health to evolutionary psychology.

Evolution selected for genes that made people feel good when they did things that benefited their genes. It selected for genes that make people feel bad when they did bad things for their genes. The principle is the same on a physical and a mental level. Ideally, physical pain is information saying "stop doing what you are doing". The mechanism is not perfect and many people suffer from inexplicable physical pain. But still, the purpose of pain is information. 

It is exactly the same with psychological pain. Ideally, psychological pain is information saying "stop doing what you are doing". The mechanism is not perfect and many people suffer from inexplicable psychological pain. But still, the purpose of psychological pain is telling people they are probably hurting their genes. 

One big problem is that our genes weren't invented yesterday. What was once good for our genes is not necessarily good for our genes today. So when we experience psychological pain, it is likely to be because we do something that was bad for our ancestors' genes.

That is the bad news. The good news is that most of us probably don't have to copy our more distant ancestors in order to feel good. As I wrote about here, many of our behavior-regulating genes were probably selected for during the last 10 000 years. That means that it is not entirely impossible to follow an important part of our genes - we don't need to move back to the savannah. We don't even have to run around in the forest chasing animals and berries. As the book The 10 000 Years Explosion (2009) explains, an important evolutionary process took place after the agricultural revolution. In Malthusian economies, there is an ongoing selection process in favor of the upper classes and the best adapted individuals of the lower classes. So probably many of us will feel rather well if we just copy certain aspects of a pre-modern agricultural society. 

In order to figure out what behavior will make us feel good or bad, we need to ask: Did this behavior increase my ancestors' chances of having children and grandchildren? I have made a list below of areas where life in pre-modern agricultural societies differ from life in modern Western society and how we might handle the difference. 

Work 

In foraging societies, being lazy can be a virtue. Foragers need to strike a balance between energy availability and energy expenditure. 

For agriculturalists, it makes much more sense to like to work, because hard work tends to pay off. Especially in a Malthusian society where there is too little land available. Those willing to work the land more intensely or to cultivate marginal land will have an advantage over those who only want to pick the low-hanging fruit.

One thing that complicates matters here is that stealing has always also been a good way to promote one's genes, at least if done successfully. Every society has had a kleptocratic upper class who stole the result of other people's work. We are the descendants of them too.

So every person has a mixture of agriculturalist genes, forager genes and kleptocrat genes. The question is what we can do with those genes now. Many people can somehow thrive in the modern economy through seeking the joys of companionship and the thrills of competition in it, as a parallel to the lives of warriors of ancient times. 

Others are not quite as adapted to that kind of life. For example, I believe myself to be very heavily loaded with agriculturalist genes. I think my ancestors became my ancestors because they liked to work and they liked to see the result of their work develop before their eyes. If I am forced to sit at a desk reading papers I don't care about, deep down I get the sense of doing nothing. Our minds reward us for doing what was work for our ancestors. Not for doing what is work today. I think this causes a lot of anxiety. The conscious parts of our brains say that we are working when we shuffle papers, because we do what someone pays us to do. Less conscious parts of our brains tell us to stop wasting our time and go out and do some real work instead. 

Agency

The lives of our ancestors were often nasty, brutish and short. But while they lived and worked, they many times had a certain degree of agency. They harvested what they sowed, more or less.

Today most people are not paid for what they actually do. They are paid for what they can make someone believe that they do. There were a few such jobs in previous centuries too, in royal bureaucracies and perhaps in the church. But those jobs were rather few. Most people were farmers and craftsmen and nature was their counterpart, with no one in between. For our ancestors, a bad harvest meant disaster. No one would save them if that happened. But no one would stop them from working for a good harvest either. They didn't spend their days trying to make someone slightly higher up in the hierarchy think that they worked hard and diligently.

This makes me believe that many humans are not adapted to such a thoroughly socialized life that the modern economy offers. Working directly with the material world, without intermediaries, gives me a certain degree of calm. I'm sure some people are perfectly adapted to handle hierarchies and conflicts and relish in the task of impressing people. But many of us are clearly not. 

Children

People who liked children took better care of their children and grandchildren. So presumably, liking children and being happy around children is a deep-seated human instinct. Why is having children then not a universal happiness generator? 

I think it mostly is because in modern society, having children collides with another instinct: Work. Those of our ancestors who both worked and had children became the most successful. Mothers who felt an urge to do something for the subsistence of the family had more surviving children than mothers who wanted to play with their children all day long. In the upper classes, parents were busy socializing, intriguing and fighting in order to keep and improve their and their children's social standing. In the lower classes, parents needed to work with the physical world. 

Although our ancestors did not work solely with taking care of children, they still tended to stay at the same place as their children.  I think most of us have inherited instincts both for wanting to work and for wanting to accompany and look after our family members. Those things are very hard to combine in modern Western society.  

Daylight 

Modern lighting has existed for less than 200 years. Electric light hardly more than 100 years. Humans have had eons of time to evolve into creatures that move around outdoors during the bright hours and rest during the dark hours. There has been very little selection pressure for tolerating whole days of indoor semi-darkness. Yet that is what modern working life demands of most of us. 

Different people are different in this respect. In the winter, Anders doesn't mind spending the whole day indoors. And he doesn't even choose a spot next to a window for his workspace. He does spend a lot of time outdoors during the summer so maybe he is just a better northerner than me, working hard in the bright summer and hibernating most of the dark winter. Meanwhile, I am pulled outside even in the bleakest days of winter, and when I'm indoors I gravitate towards the windows. For the last fifteen years I have been figuring out ways to work outdoors in the winter without getting wet and cold, because I know that I will feel bad if I don't spend at least a few hours outdoors every day. 

Higher education 

Evolution has selected for individuals who are restless to start a life when they are young. Build up a farm. Go to war and steal a farm from someone else. Have children and take good care of them. 

What are young people supposed to do in our society? Read books about things they will probably never need to know about in order to get a paper that proves their ability to read a greater number of difficult books than others. Among our ancestors, evolution surely selected against people who enjoyed wasting their time that way. It is not surprising that studies often find that many students have mental health problems.

The full monty

In order to cure my depression, I did the evolutionary psychology thing hard-core: I got married and had children. I dropped out of university. I moved to the countryside. I started to renovate and build houses and to grow food for my family. 

Did it make me happy? Yes. Did it make me rich? No. Did it make me successful? Nope. 

There is a reason why most people don't do what Anders and I did: It costs. It costs in terms of standard of living, it costs in terms of social status and most of all, it costs in terms of professional opportunities. Not only for ourselves but also for our children, which is probably more than most can bear. 

Still, those costs could be worth it if the alternative is worse. For the people that succeed in normal life this is probably hard to grasp. Modern society has given them material resources, leisure time and possibilities that their genetic ancestors couldn’t even dream of. But this only goes for the successful specimens of the modern human race. For the less successful the outlook is much less rosy. 

In my youth I always imagined myself failing in life. That is one reason I worked so hard. I hoped that if I were only better than the rest I would succeed despite my less-than-ideal beginnings and my out-of-place personality. I probably would have had some success had I continued my life in the mainstream. But it made me deeply unhappy. When I saw the chance of something else, I took it. 

I don’t expect this to work for everyone or even most people who are inexplicably unhappy. But I believe that most people can gain some insight by reflecting over how their lives correspond to evolutionary history. If something doesn’t feel right and you don't know what it is, imagine what your forager/peasant/warrior ancestors would have thought about your situation. They might give you a clue.