In Other Words

Evolution of Enjoyment

Another monday. They seem to roll around a lot more often then we would like, aye? Friday evening rolls around, then suddenly it is Monday again, without the propper time to enjoy the two days in between. It's funny how that happens. How two days in the working week can be far too long and two days of not working end up being far too short.

I wish that when we were put together (be it through evolution or otherwise) that somebody somewhere would have gone, 'yeah, but hey. Shouldn't we make time pass more slowly when they're having fun? That way we might find that they actually have the time to enjoy it!' Instead we're stuck with an unfair situation where when we have fun time goes by too quickly and when we're bored out of our wits time goes by at a crawl. It's as if somebody designed things to work this way, just to annoy the piss out of us.

Maybe that is one of the best proofs of higher intelligence so far. After all, evolution would dictate that we would be far better of if time went more slowly when we had fun, so that we would need less fun to manage. In that we would be able to do more work (which would bother us less) and therefore our survival chances as a species would be increased.

After all, evolution is all about efficiency, right? Making one species more efficient than another and, in that way, to have the more efficient species outperform the less efficient one. An ability to function better by getting more out of our enjoyment would be more efficient, ergo sum, that would have a higher chance of survival.

Maybe we have learned to get more out of less enjoyment. I wonder if people in prehistoric times needed to have more fun to get the same amount of enjoyment? I mean, we definitely work a lot now. More then when we were hunter gatherers. That's been proven, our work week went up very steeply when we embraced agriculture (thats one of the big questions marks that anthropologists have about agriculture. Why did we start doing agriculture when it required us to work so much more then it did before?)

I mean, granted, life expectancy went up, survival chances went up, you didn't have to relocate every other month, etc. But those are not advantages that are immediatly obvious when somebody says to you 'hey, want to force the land into growing the plants that we want it to grow?' I mean, lets be honest about it, hunting down and killing an animal takes less time, is more exciting and is much tastier then growing, lets see, carrots.

Of course it was probably a far more gradual process. Like the witch doctor started taking along the plants that heal and growing them in the new place they moved to. Then he added a few eddible plants that the tribe really like (like lollipop trees) and soon he had an apprentice that was only busy growing plants, because he wasn't very clever and couldn't learn the healing art, or hunt. Then a meager summer comes along and all the tribes that didn't have this type of small scale farming going on died out, so more land is available for the qausi agricultural society and thus they spread out.

Slowly more people get into farming (specialisation) and less people go hunting. They can settle down long term in one location (as they form less of a strain on the animal population) and can therefore start making their settlement more permanent and more secure from harsh winters, tough predators and other tribes. Population expands and more groups move away, being able to subsist on less then other tribes and therefore being more efficient.

So people might then have learned to gain more enjoyment in less time. (alcohol was probably invented around this time as well, after all food needs storage and food storage is the perfect situation for fermentation.) Maybe thats something that we're getting better and better at all the time.

Maybe you could even measure that from one generation to the next. After all, we spend less time doing one thing now, then before. People grow bored with the same thing more quickly then before. Maybe that's because we have learned to get more intense enjoyment out of it?

I don't know, but somebody should find out.

posted by Symbol @ 18.4.05