Our society does. Our ability to overcome challenges of nature when we work together. When we’re unchallenged by any immediate threat, something we have less and less due to our intelligence, we exercise that nature on ourselves.
I often say every war and nasty thing we do to each other is just masturbation. The guilt afterwards, the promise to never do it again. But in the timeframe of civilisation, give it a week and we’ll be rubbing one out to the nastiest shit we can find to scratch the itch, cycling back into the loop of guilt again… Repeat, repeat, repeat… Why do we do it? Human nature has it’s dark side.
You don’t get to be #1 species by being a forward thinking and peaceful being. But while our modern legacy is more about every generation swearing it won’t be like the one before it, in nature genetic traits don’t just go away as fast as we’d like.
Hence the attraction of tribalism still beats long-term sense.Gender, skin colour, and income are at the forefront of minds instead of climate. We don a team’s sport jersey to fil that hole, but it’s just a useless thing—the team of people kicking inflated leather around don’t even know who we are, afterall. We ignore those we don’t have immediate connection to but see them in the daily news. We do things to make us feel better and exercise the nature, but overcome the guilt of being judged by others by masking it with a “good cause” that’s easy to achieve but ultimately a low priority overall.
People want to be seen and remembered for dying on a hill. But it’ll be over social issues that ultimately are self-made issues.
If you were born the only person on earth, you would not have ever known about gender in society or what it is to be a different one. You wouldn’t know of the hardships of skin colours, hair colours, or your breasts or penis being big or small. You could be slim built, your could be robustly built, you wouldn’t know if either is good or bad because no one was ever there to make up and claim that idea. There’d be no people controlling for balance of these things and no people controlling entitlement or belittlement of these things. You wouldn’t know any of that would ever exist; you couldn’t even guess what thing would become a positive or negative in society.
That’s how valuable those things are and it gives an insight into how much they should be at the forefront of people’s minds.
And if you were to suddenly meet another human one day, you’d be elated. You would love them. You would share everything you have learned and learn everything they shared. That’s the light side of our nature. If you are fortunate enough to be able to recognise and try reject the dark side, the society side, then you’ll live a more fulfilled life and one that helps others much more than any other 5-year acronym trend or socially conservative ideology could.
But most of all, you would never take actions involving other people based on the corpse they animate, actively or subconsciously. That way if thinking is reserved for those that will ultimately tear us apart and end us. I say again, always thinking they have the best of intentions for people, not realising the true diversity of us all and the right people have to be different.
I have the confidence level turned down too but lately it doubles down on itself.
The usual conversation…
VI: “You could do this.”
Me: “That won’t work because XYZ.”
VI: “No, you can definitely do that. XYZ has nothing to do with it.”
Me: pastes it’s own suggestion in.
VI: “Almost, but that won’t work because of XYZ.”
It’s most notorious one is adding an s to Table.AddColumn() then proceeding to make a full snippet around this newly made up function. This specific example is so regular it’s become a joke at work for giving someone an unhelp response,
“What do you want to do for lunch today?”
“Have you tried table add columns?”