Paths

New roads are built to bypass busy sections. New roads create shorter smoother routes. It is nice to sail down these new roads skirting the jams and traffic headaches. Curiosity works like this. You learn new things thereby creating a new way of doing something, bypassing the muddle and confusion that you once had. New information enables you to get what you want done. Easier, better, more accurately. When these new links are formed it feels good. And we are rewarded by this change. The improved flow is rewarding for a while. Curiosity is linked with reward. We get a physiological high when those gaps in our knowledge are filled. Curiosity drives us in part to solve a problem and when that problem is solved, we get a chemical reward released inside us.

Change is vital to a happy existence. Variety is the spice of life. This saying cannot be worded any better. People have devised eight different ways to cook a potato. Anything to mix things up a bit. There are plenty of way to create a change, though a day full of routine will provide enough change for most. We are at our lowest when we can’t revel in the freedom to change what we are doing. Not being able to go out, not having the choice to do so is the most dispiriting. Reward needs change. Many will do roughly the same set of things but maybe with different people or in different places. Then we have mastery. When we pursue something intently to get better. Being more capable is change. Boredom can set in when we hit our limits. Those large leaps of progress at the start become tiny improvements as mastery sets in. We exhaust all the variations and diminishing curiosity is to be found within that field.

I have asked many people what they think drives them. Survival often comes up. Most do want to survive. Signs read ‘do not jump during rush hour’ in some busy stations. It is somewhat standard-selfish to show annoyance about being inconvenienced by those that have taken their own life. A train that is delayed brings about some frustration. People want to get home. Only when the railway workers announce that they are looking for the head do they quieten down a bit. We do indeed want to survive, but most want to thrive too. We are not focusing everything on just making it to the next day intact. We want things in life.

Some remarkable tales of people overcoming adversity are to be found that talk to us about survival. A farmer got his hand caught in his machinery and left his portable telephone in the driving cab. With no painkillers and a blunt knife, he hacked his hand off to get out of the fix. That is no mean feat. Others in similar situations have given up. One person managed to survive in a boat for many weeks drifting about in the currents. They used their bare hands to prise a nail out of the wood and used it to fish. Simply overcoming the odds is reward enough. How can I survive? I want to continue with my life, me. It is for me though, as selfish as that sounds. Selfishness is to be commended when it is used to endure the struggle. To prosper, to make headway, to achieve is the name of the game rather than simply survive. We place too much stock on the idea that we are simply doing what it takes to survive. The adrenalin pumps from time to time when there is a need to escape danger. Our survival instinct often kicks in, but nevertheless there is more to it than that. We think about all the things ahead of us that we want to do. That motivate us. We have hopes and aspirations. We strive for more. The escape from boredom. Staying alive at all costs is unappealing if the rest of your life will be limited, restrained and dull.

If we are asking what drives us and survival doesn’t sum it up well, then what about procreation? This puts those that can’t have children or don’t want children in an awkward position. Besides, a drive is there from birth until we depart. We don’t stop striving when we pass childbearing age. Far from it. Many begin their life in earnest at that point. It may be true that we have a grandparent role, but most of our children become sufficiently independent to look after themselves and their children. We may have a use in procreation as a helpful sister, brother, or grandparent, but each of these people have their own agenda. They want to do things for themselves too. Usually, they want to do things that they want with only a few dedicating their whole life to child rearing. In many cases as grandparents, it is interfering rather than assisting. To get to the point, I can tell you that conception is a side effect of sex, largely accidental, unintentional, semi-planned-at-best. The more sex we as a species have, the more offspring we create. So long as enough people are having children the population will expand, though at this point in history it seems the population is expanding beyond sensible limits. If you choose not to have children, you can still have a very fulfilling rewarding life. Whether children we have were planned or not, the basic drives come to the fore. We want to know everything we can about the process and what it entails. We have children for our pleasure. It gives us a selfish sense of being needed. It is rewarding when we see the fruits of our labour. We get a lot from seeing them progress. We revel in their success. We enjoy seeing them getting into university or doing well in the workplace. My child, me, us, we did it. The love we share of our family means a lot to us personally. Some can love a child irrespective of how devious they have become. There is a love for very nasty people. Again, that is centred on our own being. Selfishness need not be seen as evil, wicked or something to spurn. Selfishness enables us to procreate. It enables us to offer the maximum to our children.

When I talk about selfishness and a host of other seemingly negative ideas, we can be inclined to switch off. However, from negative ideas come untold positives - if you reframe things and look hard enough. One example I use to transform a negative into a positive relates to our striving to pass on our genes. Many cherish the idea of living on via our blood relations. Spreading your genes far and wide may seem a nice idea, more so if you think your genes are special. Yet the idea of passing on of your genes is a fantasy. You could be royalty, super beautiful, super fit, super-duper but no matter who you are, your genes get diluted rather quickly. For a start any immediate offspring is only half yours. The other half will be your spouses. Your grandchildren divide it into a quarter. By ten generations it is watered down to one part in over a thousand. It is less of a chain and more of a murky pool that you emerge from and potentially contribute to. Your legacy, your goofiness, ginger, gregarious gene segment that emerge in your children or skips generations and rears its head later down the line has an exaggerated importance. And the positive? When we acknowledge that our genetic code disperses quite quickly, we are more receptive to fostering - more at ease with bringing up a child that is not half ours. We say our genes, but we didn’t make them, we were handed them via a random mixing in the womb. These genes that we made no effort to create are split in half at the first conception. Diluting rapidly, halving into irrelevance generation by generation. The blood line belongs to mythology. It is a delusion.

Sexual attraction brings us together. It is desirable, compelling, and exciting. However, nature has no grand plan. We are set up to bond and bond we do. Our libido differs. Some have sex on the forefront of their mind night and day. For others it is of little interest. Sex can motivate us into action, that is for sure. Sex is not the base drive, reward is. Sex brings us reward. The release is one example of how change is so pleasurable. A different sensation, a different thing to do which releases endorphins in the mind as well as fluids elsewhere. Nature’s trick is to give us a real sense of accomplishment during and after sexual activity. All that foreplay, fighting and battling to get a relatively brief rush. It can make us proud though, for a long time after too. Memories and experience endure. Then we want more. The curiosity calls us to consider taking it further. Other people, other angles of attack, other places, and other boundaries to push. How else can I liven this up further, we ask? Curiosity really is in everything we do. Curiosity and reward feed one another.

If curiosity has different scales, different levels and some curiosities linger for far longer than others, what about reward? We can experience a small change and feel a slight reward or complete something big to feel a much bigger reward. Reward when we fill our bellies. Reward when we empty our bowels. Reward when we accomplish something. Reward when we tell people things. Lots of rewards, some bigger than others. Thinking about rewards, reward after reward that are released throughout the day, we can answer a serious question. When our life is threatened by someone, why are we so scared of dying? Rewards are chemical compounds. They are manufactured inside us and set to work. Rewards are addictive. We are addicted to life itself.

If we die, we will leave unfinished business, things that we want to do and discover. Partially filled gaps in our understanding and holes in our knowledge. That unfinished business could be science related, or in the religious arena, or things we want to see come to fruition. For some it could be nothing other than wanting to know how our family fares. I like to stress that the level of importance matters only to the individual. We care about ourselves the most, we always have and always will. We care about what happens to us, we care about what we are doing, what we are working on. That is what matters to us the most, not what others are doing. Unless of course someone is doing something that will affect us, or help us, or change things for us. You care about the rewards you are getting; you care about the things you are curious about and you are always, always, always acting in a selfish manner. You don’t want to die because of the selfish wish to see more, do more, feel more and finish more.

The reward mechanism is a bio-chemical system hence it can be played with directly. We can do this with drugs and electrical stimulus. Rats have been wired to a machine that gives them a dose of internal reward. They press a button to trigger it and trigger it they do. Endlessly. They will ignore sexual partners in the vicinity, ignore food, ignore everything around them and keep pressing. People have become hooked on drugs and follow a similar behaviour. Instant reward that is as addictive as we are to the addiction to life. The chemical process is so similar it is hard to ignore. We are more of a machine than we like to admit. We humans, those rats need a novel distraction to get them off the drugs. A more exciting environment helps considerably. Rats get bored with the other rats in the enclosure. Put a new rat in and it finds it wants to mate with it instantly. That variety is the spice of life thing - change, is powerful.

Rewards are found during and after talking with one another. Face to face works best when one can gauge reactions through body language. The more the other listens the better it is. We can be the least selfish when listening attentively to what people have to say. The most rude-selfish are those that talk a lot and care nothing for what you have to say. As for curiosity, that is evident when we care to find out about what others are doing or what they have to say. We are curious about their opinion. The rewards gleaned from talking to someone else has a curious feature. In many cases it does not matter who we tell. The most important thing is whether they are paying sufficient attention or not. It can be anyone that listens. It is almost as if we are talking to ourselves to some extent. We want to unburden our thoughts, desires, and woes. We make friends and so long as it appears that your friend likes you too, that is fine. They could be fooling you but that doesn’t matter until you discover the truth. This is the first example I give of the ignorance paradox.

What do people say to me when I tell them that mothers can’t help being anything but selfish? “I suppose so.” Labelling a mother as selfish doesn’t seem fair, but mothers have no choice. If they want to lactate, produce milk to breastfeed, they have to eat and drink themselves. They must look after themselves first and foremost. For a mother to look after someone else, namely the baby she can’t avoid being selfish. Both the mother and the baby win when the mother has her needs met. They win from the selfishness of the mother. Looking after yourself can’t be a bad thing. Can you begrudge a mother for making an effort to take essential vitamins and eating well? It is all good for her and her family. The mother eats and drinks for herself in principle thereby enabling her to feed the child.

megan-and-co

Selfishness is something we try to avoid. Yet we can’t avoid being so. The way you view selfishness is going to change. I will demonstrate that selfishness is something to behold. Selfishness gives us the motivation to help. Selfishness can lead to co-operation with others. Some will do everything for themselves, but they miss out. They don’t get the rewards from being kind and generous.

Being generous can be a wonderful thing. It is not quite as it seems though. Consider this balmy tangle. The women give the best portions, the best slices, the most food to the men. The women were being kind, considerate and generous. The men get considered first and foremost. Men took precedence over the women. Why? Well, if the men are not fed well, they can’t hunt so well. If they can’t hunt so well, they bring back less food for them and the women. They bring back less for all. So, to what extent are the women considering their own survival and wellbeing by being so generous.


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