Nobody But Yourself

As a consequence of these inventions, and practice at using them, what has emerged is shared patterns of behaviour and activities, what we call culture. And because culture is social 'software', it can evolve much more quickly than the hard-wired 'hardware' parts of what makes us us – our bodies, our emotions and our instincts.

So we now live in a world where we are trying to employ 21st century social software while we remain trapped in bodies that are largely prehistoric – they evolve very slowly, and haven't changed much in tens of thousands of years. One obvious consequence of this is the physical and emotional illness that comes from our visceral reaction to stress: What used to be an evolutionary advantage (the ability to move very fast and strike very hard when you're about to be eaten by something bigger than you) has become an evolutionary handicap, a worse-than-useless vestige of our prehistoric past.

Unless we are extraordinarily diligent and extremely self-aware and self-competent, we give up everything that make us us – we give up being nobody-but-ourselves and we become everybody else.

-Dave