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> Instead of understanding the mind (and consequently the body) as a system and listening to whatever small traces your mind has left in its great attempt to so
by pm90 6y ago
> Instead of understanding the mind (and consequently the body) as a system and listening to whatever small traces your mind has left in its great attempt to solve really important problems for you, we just blind ourselves to faux goals that we may not even actually want.
Well, what might those problems be? What goals do we “really” want?
For most of humanity, the majority of humans have had little options to change their predicament. Our brains evolved for hunting/gathering in tribes. A few thousand years ago we learned agriculture and started settling down. Very recently, we’ve improved the lives for a majority of humanity enabling many people, for the first time in our evolutionary existence, a choice in how to live their life. And that choice is either extremely empowering or terrifyingly debilitating.
The self help industry has grown to serve this market. There’s definitely a lot of “positive mentality” stuff but we also have a lot of people that are benefiting hugely from getting help from mental health experts.
- Matumio 6y agoOur brains have evolved mainly for cultural knowledge accumulation over generations. We must learn any specific hunting/gathering skills from role models while growing up. We even learn from others what goals are worth achieving. We are right now learning from each other how to think about our goals and problems. This is not the first time humans have the choice of picking their goals. Even on an evolutionary scale we have always had cultural institutions to guide us with that (and/or exploit us). For example we have thousands of years of stories about worthy and unworthy goals.
- pm90 6y agoThousands of years is a really small time in the evolutionary history of modern humans.