The "Hardship Immune System"

We have no defense against easy lives

Many aspects of the modern world are undeniably good: medicine, stable food supplies, and low infant mortality rates.

Many aspects, however, seem to harm us: lack of meaning, lack of community, and lack of brute physicality, to name a few.

What then? Nature designed us with fundamental needs, and each is rooted in an ancient and specific form of hardship we can call “ancestral hardship”. It was the response to this hardship that we were designed to profit from; without this strain of hardship in the modern world, the profit is harder to come by.

The behavioral immune system (BIS) gives us an example of nature at its best. The BIS is tasked with preventing diseases transmitted by bacteria and viruses before they enter our bodies.

There were moments throughout all of evolutionary history in which disease could spring out of nowhere, meaning the behavioral immune system is ready to support us even when disease is not present, lying dormant until it is needed. Do we eat the moldy wooly mammoth meat that smells bad, or do we not? Our bodies generally know.

We have a BIS to prevent disease, we do not possess a “hardship immune system” to prevent ease. There is no deep seated disgust or immunological reaction to an absence of hardship for a single reason: an excess of ease was never an option during our species entire history on earth.

Difficulty was a permanent aspect of life.

We can use food as one example. When a pre-state woman found a fig tree weighed down with figs, her body didn’t warn her before the fact to limit how many she should eat so that she would not become obese and diseased and suffer an early death. This scenario was simply too rare.

We are obsessed with feast mode because we are wired for famine mode. We were not designed to live with an endless supply of calories, as seen in the horrific levels of obesity spreading throughout the world. Our hypothetical “hardship immune system” cannot warn us ahead of time like the very real BIS can.

Why would nature create men and women designed for easy living as opposed to those who thrive under pain and adrenaline and lactic acid? To whom would the un-pressure tested be of use, and how?

If Nature could speak, what would she say? She might say something like, “I molded you to excel under duress. I give you a clear mind when you lack calories; I strengthen your muscles when you use them; I give you greater love for others when you suffer beside them in hard times. I did not prepare you for ease. That is a luxury of your own creation. It will either rot you to extinction or, if you learn to unite the most gritty and visceral and difficult aspects of the pre-state world with the exceptional achievements of the modern, it will spread your species throughout the galaxy.”

The only humans who survived were those whose minds and bodies responded positively to ancestral threats which were always present and always severe. If we weren’t wired for hardship, then we wouldn’t be here.

What then?

There is a void within our lives that is the exact shape of ancestral forms of hardship and the profound sources of meaning this hardship once gave rise to. Turning this void around and learning what it is - and how to fill it - is the subject of essays to come.