Our Greatest Gift

Evolution has condemned our species to a life of togetherness. Our brain's capacity for social pain, our ability for our hearts to be broken is evolution's greatest gift to human kind.

The loss of a loved one may be the most intense pain any of us will ever experience. While physical wounds typically heal over time, we still burst out in tears, years after that loss of a loved one, on quit moments when we think about the love lost; some of the social pains never truly go away. This pain we feel when we're permanently, or even temporarily separated from a loved one is the reason why Maslow's pyramid of needs is only right when talking about individuals. Maslow said that only when our need for food, water and shelter are fulfilled, the need for social relationships even becomes relevant. These two should be sitting on the same level when talking about our species and mammals in general..

All mammals, need social connections as much as they do food and water; it's the only reason mammals even survive the first months or years, because we're all born helpless. We only survived because there was someone there that had such a strong connection with us that every time they were separated from us or heard us cry, they would rush over to find us and take care of us. As infants, crying was our only mode of communication, so we cried when we were hungry, thirsty or cold and every time we did, that loving someone rushed over to give us what we need.

Social separation causes real pain; the same regions of the brain that light up when we feel physical pain also light up when we feel social pain. There's a strong suspicion among evolutionary biologists that we only survived and climbed to the top of the food chain in the dawning days of homo sapiens because of our strong social skills, our ability to cooperate and organize; saber-toothed tiger and mammoths were no match against us once we organized and started hunting them down in packs.

This urge of ours to connect, and the pain we feel when those connections are broken, is evolution's greatest gift to mankind. It's what moves us to live, play and work together. To organize in groups to get things done that none uf us could have achieved individually. Unfortunately we live in a world and in times that place the individual on a pedestal and looks down on social dependencies. We celebrate so called individual achievements and individual achievers. We're told that we must "take care of number one" first, and that no one will take care of us if we don't take care of ourself first. If you're so selfless that you give away so much of what you have to those less fortunate than you, and one day you get sick and don't have enough money for a doctor, than that's your fault; you should have been a little more selfish and a little less selfless. Funny, isn't it?

We need to connect, it's embedded in our evolutionary, biological and psychological make-up. A great idea by yourself is worth absolutely nothing; you need a group of people to like that idea, others that are willing to dedicate their time and energy to (the realization of) that idea. Like I'm sitting here, typing all by myself, so I need you, dear reader, for that time spent to be worth anything at all. When we have a great idea or work of art, we feel an urge to share it with the world. And here, again, our daily reality of capitalism and individualism says that we must sit on that idea, secure it with a patent, and never share unless it benefits us financially.

The fact that we are brainwashed into underestimating the importance of our social connections, is in my mind one of the greatest problems of today. Evolution's greatest gift to mankind is our interdependence, our social connections, our awareness of the fact that alone we're worth nothing and alone we achieve nothing. We're all products of that greatest gift, and it'll be our downfall if we forget it altogether...

The above is a redacted version of a post I originally released on Steemit in November 2018

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