Recently I watched a documentary on the discovery channel to do with incredible human body procedures. This particular episode focussed on the brain. In one segment, it talked about this one chap who had suffered a spelunking accident and had fallen into an un-climbable hole in the cave system he was exploring. He ended up stuck there for around 28 days, which of course meant he suffered dreadfully from a lack of food and drink. The program informed me that one of the brain's most central programming procedures is to constantly search for food, but when no food is available it goes into an `overdrive` state, during which the consumption of bodily fats and even muscles is accelerated to a drastic speed, and the body is forced to scour every nook and cranny of the surrounding area in a desperate attempt to find food.
Interesting as it is, that's a very simple statement; we need food, so we go find something to eat. But it got me thinking about the concept of wanting things you don't, and sometimes CAN'T have.
People often joke or complain about wanting things that they can't have, or aren't allowed to have. Mostly the whiny teenagers of Facebook or the creepy denizens of internet forums, if I'm honest. But it is a common theme nonetheless.
I got to thinking, why is this? Why do we always seem to want what we can't have? It's always that level of attachment we just can't seem to break off – we can never seem to think to ourselves; "Okay, out of my reach. Forget about it and move on." The thing we want is always at the back of our heads, occupying our thoughts constantly.
This occurs a lot for almost everybody. We find new products we can't wait to get our hands on, see adverts for a movie we really want to watch, hell – fall in love! There's hundreds of reasons for people to suddenly want something, and just as many holding us back.
Hell, in the middle ages this was SUPPOSED to happen; in those days, there was the concept of `courtly love` for example, frequently involving knights engaging in jousts and melee combat to win the favour of ladies who were already married. The Spartans had a wedding ceremony involving the man having to physically kidnap the woman from her home. (And the hardest challenge kids these days face is getting their text saying "I <3 U. Go owt w me?" in before someone else…) This is based mostly around the principle that you're SUPPOSED to love someone out of your reach, and must overcome certain obstacles to `prove your worth` or something, but the principle still stands.
It just gets to me that these days we no longer expect barriers to the same degree- we seem to have the mental attitude that most everything is obtainable with a little effort, yet throughout history we were brought up to think that `everything is above you. You've got no chance of achieving anything`. (Unless you're hereditarily rich, of course…) This leads to the issue that people tend to throw a bit of a hissy fit these days when things seem out of reach, but are usually more in the "curl up in a ball and throw a tantrum" or "get depressed and expect attention" modes rather than the "try and fix things" mode. In essence, give it a few hundred years and our nation will likely be reduced to a group of lazy slobs who aren't even willing to get up out of their chair to go find food. An unwillingness to try because it seems too hard will eventually be able to override the brain's core functions.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, that at this rate people will eventually lose the will to try altogether. Not just at trying to hook up with people, but at everything. We'll become robots. Or just huge blobs of fat on a sofa, take your pick…
Of course, it isn't only that – it's DEPRESSING. Like I said, one of modern man's choice reactions these days seems to be to get all depressed about things rather than either a) move on or b) not give up and keep fighting. Now don't get me wrong, I'm guilty of my fair share of this myself. But I'm only human like everyone, and I've grown up in an age where this seems to be the accepted norm. Granted, it is INCREDIBLY hard to try and NOT get upset about something that's really upsetting you, but my point is that our ancestors were bred to do just that. They were bred with the expectations that failure was guaranteed, and success – when it came – was something to be savoured, not casually accepted. Our psychology leads us to casually accept success and become depressed over failures. Before I go on, I cannot express enough how, as per usual, I'm generalising hugely. There are of course a great many people out there who never give up no matter what, and embrace failure as a way to capitalise on their mistakes. Yet considering the size of the human population, a "great many" people just isn't really enough.
Here's my advice to David Cameron – if you really want to make the nation happier, instead of spending two million pounds on a "happiness survey" that tells us EXACTLY what we already knew, start being tougher on the younger generation. We're being spoon fed, if I'm brutally honest. Let's have a global crackdown on telling kids that "everything is going to be okay", because we're just encouraging laziness. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to make unemotional hard cases out of everyone – I just think that telling people to suck it up and man up a bit won't go amiss.
I'm serious – being tougher people will likely improve humanity no end…
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