Wood From Eden / by Tove K / May 14, 2024 at 10:13 PM
More people should write exactly one book: The one about themselves. People lead very different lives. If everybody capable of writing a book wrote one about themselves, the body of written knowledge in this world would rise dramatically. Most people possess unique knowledge about themselves and their lives and rather little knowledge of everything else.
Wednesday Martin, PhD in anthropology, is one of those people whom I find great at writing about her own life and not-so-great at writing about other things. Her 2008 book Stepmonster is built up around vague but persistent accusations against everyone of treating stepmothers unfairly. Untrue (2018) is built on equally vague and persistent accusations against everyone for treating female sexuality unfairly. Primates of Park Avenue (2016), on the other hand, is nothing less than a masterpiece.
Officially, Wednesday wrote the latter book in the role of an undercover anthropologist after she married a monied man and moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Reading the book, it is obvious that she wasn't there as an anthropologist, but as a wife among the other wives: Wednesday herself was one of those primates: She chased the same apartments, the same high-prestige pre-schools and the same handbags as them, with the same intensity. That is what makes the book a true masterpiece: Through being one of those primates herself, Wednesday can tell not only how they behave, but also why they behave that way, or at least how they feel when they behave like they do.
The plotline is, more or less: The beautiful, blond and 30-something academic Wednesday Martin marries the about ten years older financier Joel Moser. Moser wants to live closer to his family, so the couple moves to the Upper East Side of Manhattan where the rich people live. They can afford mid-range, but not top-range places there.
Wednesday Martin
Wednesday dives into "domestic" tasks like hiring a broker to find that right apartment within the boundaries of the best school district for her. She participates in crazy work-out sessions in order to keep an expensive-looking body. And she spends hundreds of hours chasing a handbag that will impress the other wives.
That handbag story is the real highlight of the book. It starts one day when Wednesday is passed by on a street by a somewhat older luxury wife, in her mid-fifties. The pavement is broad. Still the other lady walks close to Wednesday. So close that her "magnificent" handbag brushes against Wednesday's arm. Wednesday has been through this enough times to know what it means: It's a demonstration of power.
Wednesday then gives us a crash course in designer handbags, and, specifically, her favorite designer handbag, the Hermès Birkin. The Hermès Birkin, we learn, is a man-made scarcity. Hermès makes only a few hundred of them every year. They cost a lot of money, at least eight thousand dollars. Still, they can't be bought for money only. It takes contacts, social skills and great knowledge of the field to get one's hand on a Hermès Birkin bag. This makes the Birkin handbag a powerful symbol of female status.
Hermès Bikin (above) and Hermès Kelly (below): Worlds apart.
To me, the Hermès Birkin doesn't look much different from the Hermès Kelly. But Wednesday Martin knows better: The Kelly is meek and bland, because anyone with money can buy it. The Birkin, on the other hand, has character, because it shows that its owner has contacts, determination and grit, properties even more valuable than money on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Now the amazing thing happens: Wednesday Martin, PhD in anthropology, a pregnant mother of one in her upper thirties, becomes obsessed with owning a Hermès Birkin bag. On a business trip in Asia, Wednesday's kind husband tries hard and finally succeeds in buying a Hermès Birkin bag in Tokyo. Wednesday cherishes her bag and carries it everywhere until some years later when the bag’s unergonomic design causes her a strain injury in her arm that forces her to choose between her bag and her writing.
One could think that a PhD in anthropology should be able to see through such a superficial and obviously rigged social game. But Wednesday has her reasons to make seemingly weird priorities: She inhabits a very rough environment where people are forced to fight for their social survival. The rich wives form cliques from which they openly exclude women deemed unworthy. Excluding people is simple: If someone unworthy greets you, just don't answer. Playdates between children are in reality a social status game, where mothers try to climb toward the higher social levels. It is not about which children happen to like each other, but about how mothers can enhance or lower their status from whose children their children are allowed to play with. Even pre-school is highly competitive: Only the most well-behaved children are allowed in the best pre-schools. Plus those with the parents with the right connections, of course.
On top of everything there is the Queen of the Bees, who behaves like a classic female bully and apparently gets away with it very well. Wednesday tells us about this particularly unpleasant person:
"The recent stories of her nastiness were legion. She told women, in front of their friends, that they were ugly, that they were stupid, that there was something wrong with their children. I thought her a crass bully, and even worse, an empress with no clothes, the Chanel notwithstanding. Because she was so rich and powerful, the people who rolled their eyes behind her back were too petrified to actually confront her about her nasty antics. School administrators looked the other way because she made big contributions. Everyone else took her put-downs meekly and sat at her table at events, hoping for a scrap of I didn’t know what. Business? Money? A ruffle or ribbon of her haute couture?"
In this rough environment, different wives have different tricks to stand out. Some of the wives systematically start using their new summer clothes when it is still winter and their new winter clothes early in the autumn. That way, they will be the first. Other women then use the same clothes at their own peril: it might lower their social status. Wednesday strongly feels that her new summer dress has been sullied after someone used a dress of the same design already in February.
Subcultures are also formed around seemingly pointless differences. Everyone works out like crazy: Apparently, that is what you are supposed to do if your husband pays you ten times the normal rate for being a wife and mother. There are two main ways to work out: Ballet inspired extreme workout classes and group cycling classes. Wednesday never tries cycling because the wives who do cycling are very clubby and try to seem a bit rough: They sport handkerchiefs around their heads, gangster-style, and sweat and groan and swear while working out. When Wednesday greets some women she recognizes in a cycling group, they just don't answer: being someone who does the ballety thing for exercise, she doesn't belong to their tribe.
I have never been to New York City. I have met only a few rich people. And still, the social pattern described in the book feels eerily familiar. After all, I was once a teenage girl. Forming cliques, creating a world consisting solely of social status, a fixation with clothes and looks: teenage girls are commonly known for that, and the girls in the working class town where I grew up were no exception. The subtle bullying between strangers and the creation of pointless subcultures also is very much a teenage thing, that thankfully tends to disappear when people grow up. Except, apparently, among people who grow up under financially privileged conditions on one of the most expensive spots on Earth.
The unpleasant behavior of the rich wives deeply challenged my assumptions about teenagers. Until Wednesday told me about her peers and herself, I thought that teenagers' bad behavior was due to their immaturity: They were young and insecure, I thought. By time, they learn how to both survive and be a bit nice. The primates of Park Avenue proved me wrong on that point. Obviously, people who are both resourceful, intelligent and experienced can behave just as unpleasantly as your average high-school bully.
What is the common denominator between a teenager and a high-status wife, except that both are members of the human race? I can think of only one: None of them works for a living. Both groups instead socialize intensely, competitively and hostilely. Could it then be their non-working status as much as their age that makes many teenagers unusually mean?
People who work for a living, and work together, need to cooperate in order to get things done. They have less time to care about what this or that handbag or bandana really symbolizes, who is in or out and who can get me more in or out. By contrast, people who most of all socialize need to focus on social issues. Social codes that look trivial from the outside become almost life-and-death questions for teenagers and rich wives alike.
As always, more research is needed. But at least, I now think there is hope that research could improve the perpetual problem with teen mental health. If typical teenage behavior can actually be induced in middle-aged, very socially privileged people, then that is a sign that it could also be de-induced in teenagers, at least to some degree. That is more than I ever dared to hope for.
Primates of Park Avenue depicts adults who do not behave like adults. Now I'm waiting for, and searching for, the book about teenagers who do not behave like teenagers.
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Stress is about cheating
Wood From Eden / by Tove K / May 14, 2024 at 10:14 PM
Part 1 of a planned series on warriors and workers
Summer is approaching. And here, summer means a lot of manual work. Which makes me think of that common psychological response to having too much to do: Stress.
I do a lot of stupid work (not stupid as in unnecessary but stupid in the sense that I do not need my brain to do it). Which gives me a lot of time to think about work and the mental states related to it. Like the feeling of stress. Why do we get it? What is it good for? How can it be avoided? Should it be avoided?
After a number of years, I think I have cracked the code: Stress is the feeling one gets when there is so much to do that it can't be done without cheating. For most people, cheating is unpleasant. In order to get the courage to cheat, we need another unpleasant feeling to whip us into it. And that feeling is called stress.
Stress is what we experience when we have too many deadlines to meet too soon. We know that something must go. But we don't know what. So the feeling of stress becomes a perpetual spur to cheat with small things. Maybe work can't be sacrificed. But cooking can. So stressed people eat sandwiches and drink Coke although they know they will feel bad from it in the long term. They avoid double-checking details they know they should be double-checking and hope to get away with it. They know they should be friendly to people around them, but they cheat with that too, because they know they will get away with it, for a while at least.
Stressed people are constantly asking themselves a certain question: Am I doing the right thing right now? Am I doing something that I should actually be cheating with? That way, whatever stressed people are doing, they always question whether they should be doing something else instead.
After having realized that stress is essentially about cheating, I had the key to stop feeling stressed in everyday life: Only set ridiculously realistic and flexible goals for myself. Decide exactly what I want to do with the time and energy I have and do that and nothing else.
Humans in general want to do more than they are able to do. That is only natural. The opposite, wanting to do less than one is technically capable of doing is called depression. That is not a nice feeling. So the first step towards not being stressed is accepting that if ambitions are higher than ability, that is just a sign of mental health.
Step 2 is to choose consciously among those ambitions. This is hard, because it requires giving up on parts of one's identity. I want to be a person who works hard, keeps physically in shape, spends time with my children, reads books, writes about what I read, maintains a home with a certain standard of maintenance and cleanliness, has many children, wears clothes that are not visibly worn out… I want all that. And I can't achieve all that. I have to choose.
The choice can be made two ways:
• Consciously and calmly making priorities: What is important and what is less important? What needs to be done right now and what can be saved for later? What should I simply skip?
• Unconsciously and chaotically. Try to do everything that would be nice to do, and cheat constantly in the process.
The cost of avoiding stress is to admit to oneself: Actually, I'm no better than that. I can't achieve more. The benefit, except the obvious emotional benefits, is the opportunity to do things as thoroughly as one prefers.
What is the good thing with stress then? It is to get the power to cheat when it is unavoidable.
Sometimes, hopefully most times, it is possible to admit to oneself that one thing or another isn't doable and needs to be down-prioritized, come what may. Sometimes, one or another thing just can't be consciously down-prioritized: An imminent threat to life and property. A person in danger for physical or psychological reasons. Higher powers that threaten to ruin one's life and require immediate action.
When really fast decisions are required, spontaneous cheating is the only appropriate mechanism. When calm, conscious cheating isn't possible, panicked, spontaneous cheating is a necessity. It has saved innumerable lives.
In a state of battle, stress is the appropriate attitude. In a state of everyday work, it is not. Or at least shouldn't be.
Making a priority list is easy. People should have figured that out a long time ago. Why do so many people, maybe a majority of people in certain age brackets, still feel significantly stressed? And why do so many employers prefer to keep their workforces under constant, low-intensity stress?
Some jobs are a bit like war. People need to keep vigilant in order to survive. Some jobs are plain impossible and workers need to cheat in order to uphold a semblance of doing them. But people who are doing entirely normal, technical things at work are often stressed too. Employers are establishing routines and then load so much work on people that those routines can't be upheld. Then they leave it to the employee to decide how to cheat with those routines.
Is that wise? If everybody involved is actually very bad at making priorities, it could be. There might be many people who are just incapable of prioritizing consciously, but who are capable of prioritizing subconsciously. That is, people who only work effectively when put under stress.
But I suspect the foremost reason why people feel stressed is that life really is a battle. In a battle, it is very unwise not to feel stressed, because you never know what the battle will throw at you and you better be ready for everything, everywhere all at once. Many people also live their civilian lives that way. They are constantly sparring against other people. And other people are unpredictable.
When working with genuinely technical stuff, it is possible to make a list of priorities. In the social realm, it is not. There the big sport is to keep up appearances. Which appearance to keep up depends on who is looking. People who are acting on the social arena will always need to be alert in order to parry the strikes of other people. They can't afford the meditative state of technical work.
In conclusion, the most important thing that can be done to decrease stress is to apply a technical mindset whenever a technical mindset is applicable. There are enough real wars as there are.
Genre image of man trying to relieve his feeling of stress. He didn't prioritize washing his hair, but still wears a complicated bracelet: An example of the difficulties of choosing between ambitions. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
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Real workers don't meditate - by Tove K
Wood From Eden / by Tove K / May 14, 2024 at 10:15 PM
Recently I was involved in an interesting discussion on meditation. It made me read Waking Up! A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014) by Sam Harris. A new, foreign world opened in front of me. For example, Sam Harris made a trip to the Himalayas with some other Western meditation experts in order to learn from different meditation gurus.
He writes:
“A woman from Switzerland became “enlightened” in Poonja-ji’s presence. For the better part of a week, she was celebrated as something akin to the next Buddha.”
What was the woman's big alleged achievement? She claimed that she didn't think! She was completely empty-minded, she bragged. But the woman was revealed to be a fraud. A better guru called Tulku Urgyen made her realize that she was actually thinking all the time. People, including the woman herself, had mistaken her blissful state of mind for real enlightenment. In fact, she was just an ordinary stupid happy person!
Sam Harris told this anecdote in order to praise Tulku Urgyen and criticize Poonja-ji. But for me, as an outsider, the relevant part of the story is that a group of well-off, middle class people actually went to the Himalayas in order to politely compete over who was the most brainless.
Why would people arrange some status competition over whose head is the emptiest? I find it perfectly easy to understand the problem with human existence that Sam Harris describes: People walk around constantly a bit dissatisfied. Whatever happens, they always find something that could be improved and feel annoyed about the perceived lack of perfection. People can't appreciate a beautiful landscape, they can’t appreciate the feats of human ingenuity, they can’t even appreciate their own families because they constantly find flaws that someone should fix.
“The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. A move to the shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is just a little too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let’s take a look. Yes, there it is. You’re warm now, but you notice that your sweater has seen better days. Does it make you look carefree or disheveled? Perhaps it is time to go shopping for something new. And so it goes.”
I entirely get what he means. I just don't get the solution. Why is the solution to that problem to empty one's head of thoughts and to overcome the sense of an “I”, of all things?
After having read for a while, I realized that Sam Harris, and tons of people with him, live in another world than I do, with very different problems. His solution to the problem of dissatisfaction with life and self-obsession makes no sense to me, because I have another solution: I work. Not in the modern sense, through negotiating all day long with people in an office, but in the traditional sense: I build things, I grow things, I wash the dishes and I chop wood. Those activities give me something akin to the calm, matter-of-factly perception of reality that Sam Harris and millions of people like him get through meditation.
That way, explaining the virtues of meditation to me is a bit like explaining the concept of water to a fish. I suspect that the reason why I fail to understand the point of meditation is that I'm often in a kind-of-meditative state myself. Not any of the most advanced states that elite meditationers brag of on Twitter, of course. Just very ordinary, basic states of meditative mindsets. And those are good enough for me. That way, I don't spontaneously understand the idea that humans need to deliberately modify their minds. I'm already modifying my mind in that direction, every day, without thinking very much about it.
Another book I read recently emboldened me in this assumption: How Emotions are Made (2017), by Lisa Feldman Barrett. (It was one of the recommendations on the Wood from Eden book recommendations page, posted by Ken, who writes a blog called Vamps. Please write more book recommendations - at least I really appreciate them and I read at least some pages of all books recommended).
How Emotions are Made conveys the hypothesis that above very basic states of mind like feeling good and feeling bad, emotions are cultural constructs. For example, different languages have different expressions for emotions. German (and Swedish) have a word for Schadenfreude. English doesn't. But surely English-speakers could feel something like schadenfreude also before a German-speaking person imported that word into the English language? They just couldn't talk about it. They had to feel it all on their own.
Also, the Ilongot, a headhunting tribe in the Philippines has a word for an emotion called liget. It describes the sense of collective excitement from going to war against another group. The Ilongot are one of few peoples in the world that can talk about that feeling using one word. But does that mean other people do not feel it? The young American soldiers in Iraq described in Generation Kill used to yell “get some!” at each other when they were heading into dangerous missions. Didn't they feel some liget as well?
In the same way, meditation is not a word describing a state of mind for all users of the English language. For many, if not most English-speakers, it is not a description of a state of mind, but of a pattern of behavior: The word just means something weird that some middle class people do.
Does this lack of words mean that most English-speakers never experience states of mind associated with meditation? I'm convinced that people can experience states of mind without having words for them. Just like English-speakers could experience schadenfreude before the word was imported from German, people who never think about meditation should be able to experience meditative mindsets. Not intentionally and deliberately, but unintentionally, when they work.
The more I read about meditation, the more I got the thought: But workers are already doing that! If not exactly that-that, something largely similar. Just like meditation people, workers:
• become brainless
• focus on material phenomena
• forget themselves
• forget hunger, thirst and pain
I don't feel the need to go to the Himalayas to empty my head, because my head already gets too empty when I work too much with practical stuff. When I run out of thoughts, I even start to obsessively repeat some mantra. Like any guru on any mountain, but obsessively and involuntarily instead of deliberately. The mantra often is a slightly strange-sounding name, like “Saffron Siskind the San Franciscan” (Thank you for that one, Scott Alexander!). My problem is not that my head is too filled with thoughts. To the contrary, I need to refill it constantly so I don't run out of meaningful thoughts when I work and have to repeat meaningless word sequences to myself.
Why is there music blaring in most workplaces? Probably because the workers become unpleasantly empty-minded if they get no mental input at all.
Sam Harris writes that the first thing to do in order to learn to meditate is to sit upright, close your eyes and focus on your own breathing. You are supposed to attentively feel how breathing is being done and direct all wandering thoughts to the breathing. I can do that - and it makes me a bit calmer than the moment before, actually.
But I don't find the effect very different from the effect of focusing on anything that is of material nature and working as it should. Focusing on berries going through my hands into a bucket is not very different - I feel a bit calmer from that too.
Working at a too-fast tempo is not meditative. Working with tasks that are not manageable is not meditative. But as long as the work is as unproblematic as breathing, focusing on my object of work is as calm-inducing as focusing on my own physiological processes.
And curiously, I think working with the material world leads people to the highest goal of them all, according to Sam Harris: The death of the ego.
At first I found Sam Harris’ skepsis toward the ego very difficult to understand. He writes that one should liberate oneself from the feeling that there is a seeing “I” behind one's eyeballs.
I'm usually not feeling burdened by such an illusion when I look at things. To the contrary, I have the illusion that the image in front of me is one of objective reality. I have to think in order to realize that it is just I, a subjective being, that am perceiving things in a certain way.
For example, I might see a tree with ivy growing on it, thinking that if I don't do anything about it, the ivy will overgrow the entire tree, so I need to cut the ivy that climbs on the branches. The “I” here is a kind of gnome with shears - how can anyone want to eliminate such an innocent existence?
My guess is that the “I” Sam Harris is talking about is not that anonymous doer, but an entity that takes form in the friction with the “you” and “he” and “she” and “them”. It is in relation to other people that we develop our sharp-edged sense of identity. When I have other people in front of me - especially people with whom I'm feeling a bit tense - I also have that feeling of an “I” behind my eyes. Like, a week ago, when I went to a village gathering. I was wearing my working jacket with yellow reflex bands (the same one I’m wearing in the photo at the end of this article). When I was there I discovered that people had “dressed up” for the occasion - apparently the dress code was inconspicuous, but neat, outdoor wear. I kept seeing myself from the outside, thinking of how much of a bad impression I made in my ill-chosen jacket. Seeing people meant being seen by people.
My guess is that such a socially induced “I” is the only “I” many people ever experience. For example, take all those women who say “I'm not doing it for others, I'm doing it for myself” regarding their make-up, hair-dyes, plastic surgery and fashionable clothes. For them “myself” must be something that only exists in immediate relation to other people.
When I moved to the countryside and started working with practical stuff, I quickly learned one thing: The most dangerous thing a worker can do is to ask themselves: How do I look now? If I'm hammering in nails and shift perspective to seeing myself from the outside, I can be almost certain that something will go wrong very quickly. In the worst case I will hit my thumb. In the best case I will bend the nail. There is no possible good outcome of it - thinking of oneself in a social sense ruins all physical work that requires concentration. Workers need to overcome their egos just to get things done.
Meditation practitioner Superb Owl has written about how to handle physical pain through meditation: The trick is to focus on a sensation of pain as just a sensation, decoupled from the usual interpretation of the sensation as painful.
I can easily do that over lighter pain. Not because I meditate, but because I work. When a piece of firewood hits my shin for the n:th time, I quickly notice what happened: a very well-known and non-dangerous kind of accident. I know that I can safely ignore such an accident and just move on. So I'm doing exactly as Superb Owl: I just notice a sensation and think of it like just a sensation. That way I don't have to waste time on experiencing minor pain.
Meditation practitioners learn to ignore hunger, thirst, rain and cold and heat. Workers do the same, to one degree or another. They are ignoring discomfort in favor of the task they are performing. They can't obsess over a sweater like the person in Sam Harris’ example, because they have a job to do.
My guess is that in an evolutionary sense, the feeling of mindfulness arose around repetitive physical work. The individuals who could get into some kind of mental flow when they worked could work more persistently than those who did not enjoy work one bit.
But there is a downside to it too: People who enjoy work too much tend to become a bit inefficient. I know it from my own experience. When Anders comes with creative suggestions of how he could use the tractor to improve my firewood logistics I tend to get annoyed. I don't want to hear that the work I enjoy is a bit inefficient, even if it is objectively true.
Nowadays, few workers can hold on to such preferences. For most of human history, a meditative working style functioned very well. Who was the very fastest worker was not that important. That changed with capitalism. The market economy is a competition over who can work the fastest - by any means: Technology, logistics or mere pressure on workers.
Capitalism is a competition in overcoming nature. Both the nature of the material world and human nature. Companies in the capitalistic market economy compete to overcome the laziness, conservatism and individualism that makes humans inefficient producers. And, also, they compete to overcome the spontaneous joy of work that also makes humans less than optimally efficient producers.
After having read half a book about meditation, I summarized the practice in two words: Not war. The quiet self-denial of meditation equals not-fighting.
I'm loosely suspecting that the practice of meditation arose in order for excess sons of warrior classes to calm down. As a rule, warrior dynasties produce too many sons. The alternative, too few sons, is even worse. But excess sons certainly are problematic, since they tend to lead to rivalries and civil war. In Turkey under the Sultanate, the Sultan sired numerous sons with harem slaves. After a devastating civil war in the 15th century, a law that allowed the winning son to kill his brothers was made.
Fratricide has obvious disadvantages. It is clearly brutal. It stands in opposition to another very important part of human nature: Alliances between close male kin. For that reason, a religion that encourages some sons to be as quiet and undemanding as possible serves a purpose. Actually, some branches of Buddhism idealizes certain kinds of suicide - meditating until death is seen as a high ideal. According to legend, Siddhartha Gautama was a prince. A prince who gathered a following around his own wish to perish. In a society that overproduced upper class people (like all societies tend to do), a religion celebrating non-existence could help increase social order.
I guess that buddhist kingdoms couldn't tell their excess sons to just get a hobby. They needed them to be humble. But they also needed to preserve their social status above the working masses. That way, their religion re-launched the humility of working people in fancier and more extreme forms. (Christianity expressively did much of the same, although it partially builds on other mechanisms for peacefulness and humility).
Meditation is one opposite to war. Work is another. And I think they both build on the same mechanisms in the evolved human psyche. I think the calm, non-fighting instincts that meditation builds on evolved as an adaptation to work, in opposition to the warlike side of human existence.
My purpose of this essay is not to say that meditation is useless. As things are, we live in a human zoo where many, maybe most people are actually banned from doing almost any useful practical work. People living in urban apartment complexes almost can’t do anything more offensive than breathing. In that case, focusing on breathing is the way to go.
Also, not all people are practically inclined. Even in a perfect world where everyone is free to take an ax and chop some wood, some people would just not find the inspiration to do it, or have the ability and health to do it.
My purpose here is not to say that meditation is bad and that everyone currently sitting on a yoga mat should pick up an ax instead. Meditation and manual work are two roads to the same goal: A peaceful live-and-let-live existence. Either people avoid fighting each other through avoiding all kinds of fights. Or they avoid fighting each other through fighting the materia instead. In a peaceful future, both options are likely to be useful.
Wood-based cross-training! I'm sure city people somewhere pay a fortune for the opportunity to lift pieces of logs from spot A to spot B.
Substacks referred to in the post above:
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Social engineering: Why a technical mindset is a prosocial mindset
Wood From Eden / by Tove K / May 14, 2024 at 9:27 AM
Sebastaien Vrancx, Summer, between 1596 and 1601. Wikimedia Commons
In a few posts I have, tentatively, tried to outline a concept: the warrior/worker mentality. I started this project a long time ago. In the summer of 2022 I wrote kind-of-a-book-review of Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin. Primates of Park Avenue (2016) describes the social environment among some of the ostensibly most privileged people on the planet: Urban women who are very well provided for by their rich husbands. In Wednesday Martin's account, those women behave more or less like mean and superficial teenage girls. They form social cliques around pointless issues like the choice of work-out method. They compete fiercely over fashion, using unjust methods like wearing summer clothes in February in order to be the first to wear a certain style of dress. And they play a game of chicken where older women with very exclusive handbags run into younger women with less expensive handbags as an act of domination and intimidation.
I concluded that there is only one important common denominator between these women in their 30s and 40s and the teenage girls they are behaving like: None of them work for a living. Both luxury wives and teenage girls are provided for by others. Thereby they have important parts of their days over for nurturing their conflicts.
In two more recent posts - Stress is about cheating and Real workers don't meditate - I have tried to highlight examples of the opposite situation: When work makes people more peaceful.
Superficially, the principle looks simple: When people work with the material world, they are minding their own business. A person focusing on how seeds are sprouting or how wood is splitting has less mental capacity left for who-did-what and who-wears-what and who-is-with-whom. People who focus on the material world are simply turning their attention away from each other.
But I strongly suspect that there are also deeper, evolved mechanisms behind the social psychology of people who work and of people who do not work. Throughout history, humans have alternated between making war over resources and working with those resources. During all that time, psychological mechanisms for sensing when to make war and when to work should have evolved.
And now to evolution
Today's humans are the descendants of three kinds of people: Warriors and workers, and of people who alternated between war and labor.
Within societies, some people specialized in war and some in work. At the most primitive stage men tend to be more of warriors and women tend to be more of workers. At more advanced stages, a ruling warrior class with members of both sexes emerged, with workers of both sexes below them.
Some entire societies are also more warlike than others. In history, when two groups contested an area with good subsistence opportunities, the contestants had a choice:
1. Stay and fight for the good area.
2. Move away to an area that is not contested because no one else wants to be there. Make the area livable through working harder and being more innovative than others.
We are the descendants of both kinds of people. Among the ancestors of modern humans there are both people who won the wars and grabbed the best spots and people who were militarily weaker but could learn to thrive in less ideal environments. Especially, on the male side we stem from warriors and on the female side we stem from less warlike, working populations.
Infinitely flexible
All-in-all, our ancestors had to be flexible. Sometimes it was time to fight, sometimes it was time to work. Unusually brave warriors tended to have more children than average (if they didn't die too young). In a non-growing, Malthusian society those children mostly didn't reach the same social level as their father - many of them were pushed down to the level of the working population. And if not, the grandchildren were.1
In Malthusian societies, warrior grandfathers tend to sire worker grandchildren. The warrior genomes that were only good for war didn't do very well in such an environment. Instead, flexibility should have been selected for: Genes that make people decent workers when they need to work and good warriors when they need to make war.
For humans, both on the individual and societal level, fortunes change so rapidly that flexibility is the key to success. Humans should have evolved to go in and out of warrior mode and worker mode. Some individuals inevitably got more adapted to a warrior lifestyle, others more to a worker lifestyle. But most individuals are at least a bit flexible: They can both be part of working crews and troops of fighters.
The stresses of leisure
In nature, leisure time means an environment where all necessities can be produced in a shorter time than humans have at their disposal. Leisure is the same thing as abundance. And everyone is after abundance. During almost our entire history as a species and even before that, people who had leisure time controlled resources that others wanted.
There are a few exceptions, like when entirely new continents were discovered or after disasters like epidemics that killed off an important share of all people. But on most occasions the environment was fully populated. (If nothing else, the extinction of the Neanderthal people, the Denisovans and homo floresiensis is a sign of that. If there was plenty of space, different types of humans wouldn't have outcompeted each other.) Then people either had to fight for the good areas or move to the worse areas.
People who lived in a good area sooner or later had to fight to remain there. Over time, I think an instinct evolved: Whenever you have the opportunity to do what you feel like, make sure that you feel like preparing for war. Individuals, and groups of individuals who felt that they had to keep alert for current and future conflicts did better than people who used the leisure they were given to just practice the hobby of their choice.
In history there are a few examples of members of comparatively leisured warrior classes who actually went all in with their nerdy interests. Notably in ancient Greece, where the (semi)leisured class was unusually broad and inclusive, individuals like Pythagoras and Archimedes and Socrates and Aristoteles could practice their interests and gather their followings. But at most times, in most places, leisured upper class people have had no time for such peacefully contemplative endeavors. They have been too busy competing for who is to remain a leisured exploiter and who is to get killed.
For that reason I believe that humans have an instinct to use their excess fre
