The Paradox of Development

I've been reading Steven Kent's The Ultimate History of Video Games, and while it's not as good as David Sheff's Nintendo-centric Game Over, it's an enjoyable read nonetheless. Mind you, this comes right on the heels of completing Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, so hopefully by the time I finish, I will know the entire history of the universe. Awesome.

Whenever I read any kind of history book, I always think, "Man, those people really had it rough, thinking Pong was a really mindblowing game," or "God, life would have really sucked without air conditioning or cars or the Internet." I've always assumed that the more developed the civilization you're born into, the happier you're going to be, but it turns out that that may not be the case.

The survey involved college students, but I think that those results would generalize to the entire population. Everyone is worried. Worried about security, worried about the economy, worried about their health, worried about their lives. I would never argue that more information is a bad thing, but regardless, sometimes even I am tempted to wish that we didn't know so much.

Stress, as a matter of fact, is evolutionarily a good thing. It ramps up all your body systems so that when the tiger is sniffing around your cave, you have the energy and attentiveness to run away from it or kill it. Ultimately, the long-term effects of stress hormones are harmful to your body, but if you don't get away from the tiger, any long-term concern is, of course, moot. So you're designed to stress for a little while and then once the immediate threat is gone, you go back to a state of biochemical balance.

What our more advanced brains and civilization have allowed us to do, however, is extend that stress response to ALL THE F'ING TIME by permitting us to stress about things in the future that haven't even happened yet. What's going to happen to my 401(k)? What if I lose my job? Am I going to go to hell when I die? Is my dental x-ray going to give me cancer? Will my career recover if I don't get promoted to VP soon? Every day is full of nothing but stress for all of us. I even stress during vacation, because I worry about getting charged for accidentally bumping the sensor in the minibar and bringing home bedbugs.

So at some level, I do think that maybe those primitive old farts did indeed have it better. Would I trade my life now for a life of exploring and fishing and hunting my own food in whatever land was the Pre-Columbian Hawaii of the time? Maybe. I'd probably be eaten by something by age 25, but I would never have to ride the DC Metro, so it's a wash.