To understand everything necessary for you to understand about yourself, you need only know this one fact: you are a prehistoric forager. Your physiology, your muscles, your sensory systems, your immune system, your digestive system, your behavioral predispositions, and your emotional sensitivities are all designed specifically to accommodate the requirements of a foraging lifestyle. Your brain is wired to facilitate the navigation of a free, physically active, spiritually rich life in a small highly-egalitarian social group culturally embedded in local natural systems. This is who you are. You are a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer to the very core of your being.
The lifestyle that you have been forced to adopt is not who you are. In many ways it represents a negation of who you are. The mismatch between your physical and psychological expectations and the compulsory demands of a technology-dependent post-industrial civilization is an unbridgeable gulf. Your muscles are atrophied. Your heart languishes in a soup of stress hormone metabolites. Your lungs are brittle bags. Your eyes have lost their acuity and are blind to the periphery, and your visual world has subsequently become a narrowing tunnel. There are sounds you can no longer hear, smells that have been permanently masked, and flavors and textures that you will never know. Physically, you are little more than a walking corpse.
Psychologically, you are a child. Your goals and aspirations have been entrained to the will of an unfeeling planet-devouring machine. Your thoughts have become mechanized and outsourced. Your emotional reactions are those of an infant.
And you are not free.
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