Waste and Limited Resources

Space, time, and energy is about all we're given to work with. And of those, only energy do we have any power to moderate. Energy spent on one thing, necessarily can't be spent on anything else, it can only change forms. It's that natural balancing limit which is important.
As a quick example of what I mean, everyone knows jellyfish for their sting. They sting because they're predators and that's how they catch their food which keeps them alive. Some time ago, a group of jellies got separated from the environment that their ancestors had grown to, and were forced to adapt to their new surroundings or die. So over a few tens of thousands of generations fighting the constant uphill battle against large-scale death, they went from carnivorous predators, to vegetarian farmers in the absence of available food resources to which their species had previously adapted. This eyeless, brainless organism follows the sun for miles across the lake it lives in everyday to feed it's own internal garden of algae that it has adapted to feed on. These jellies don't sting, because they've lost their need to. Why not keep it anyway just in case? Because life never learned how to waste.
People on the other hand have mastered waste, that's why we think it's normal. We waste time, we waste space, we waste energy because we think it's unlimited. When you're sitting in front of the television, watching the real world with your brain on idle, not only are you wasting time, you're wasting mental energy (albeit very little). The very same mental energy that can be turned into paintings, or music, or a story, or an A paper, or the perfect rebuttal to that joke your social nemesis cut on you in class the other day. Sure you could do all of that later, but that doesn't mean the result is the same. That energy you spent zoning out absorbing nonsense from the television or whatever other source is gone. Forever. It ain't coming back. Sure you have enough of it over the course of your life to make up for it, but why do we even put ourselves in that hole?

The Beginning of a Culture

I was watching this documentary called Food for Thought, when I saw a remarkable thing. The host of the series was sitting with a group of chimpanzees living on a mangrove-covered island near the mouth of the Congo. The chimpanzees in this particular place were orphans, whose parents were killed for what they call bush-meat. Researchers were attempting to rehabilitate them and teach them the skills that their parents would have taught them, so that they could be reintroduced into the wild and survive on their own. Some of the chimps had learned to do certain things by observing and imitating people. These particular chimps were illustrating a way to crack nuts. They would take a nut, put it in a divet so it wouldn't roll around, and smash it with a log.

While observing this behavior, the narrator made what struck me as an outstanding remark.

"There are many different ways to crack a nut. Furthermore, there are many different kinds of nuts. So different groups of chimps, have developed different ways of dealing with the problem. That is the beginning of a culture."

This was remarkable to me for two reasons: One is that watching this whole documentary, and many others that I have watched over the course of my life, it's nothing shy of fascinating to see how human-like many ape species are; the second reason was that it immediately struck me how right that comment was.

Isn't that all cultural differences really are? Just long-lived, deep-seeded differences in the way our particular cultural ancestor's taught their progeny to solve life's problems. We all face the same problems, just in slightly different forms depending on where we came from, and the stresses that our particular environment imposed. And that simple beginning is what has led to such dramatically different approaches, and thus the many cultures that we see today.

If you think about it, and look at all the vastly different cultures of the world, and the way they mix and mesh, and sometimes clash where they meet, doesn't it just make sense. Take any two polar opposites, like modern America, and extremist Islam for example. It's hard to imagine that the terrorist attacks against America would have ever taken place absent different views on the world and the way its problems should be solved.

But it seems like we've gotten so caught up in all the scenery; the history, the stories, and the pride of our own culture, that we've forgotten the point of it all. We're all just trying to solve our own problems in our own ways, and sometimes we're so proud of our own way, and so convinced that it's right because it has worked for us, that we impune other approaches for being so wrong. But doesn't it almost seem like we all have to be right in our own way, otherwise it wouldn't have worked? Perhaps that's too big a pill for humanity to swallow yet.

Is this the ultimate irony of life? We're all fighting different battles, but in the same war. Yet sometimes when we encounter people who do things differently, because they had to do it their own way in their own place, we feel the need to impose our own will on them because our vision is so myopic and narrow that we can't see the bigger picture. Sometimes we even kill each other, for simply doing what we were taught to do in order to solve life's problems. We kill, for living. Is this why we were cautioned against excessive pride?

Nah, can't be, I must just be crazy. People aren't as simple as apes...

Part of the Problem. OR Suzy Good-Girl vs. Kelly Quick-Butt

One of our biggest problems as a society is the way we look at sex. As a guy, we are at least 50% responsible for it. Consider this illustration.

Take Suzy Good-Girl. She’s a good girl. She wants a husband, a family, a career, the whole nine yards. She’s behaved her whole life, no old sex flings in her closet, no dirty little secrets that would spoil her worth in the eyes of her prospective husband, she wants to do things right. The first guy she goes to bed with will be her husband she says.

But wait a minute, Suzy forgot something. It’s 2007, and sluts abound.

What is gonna make Timmy Everyman think Suzy is so worth waiting for? Why would he do that anyway when he’s a young man, and all every young man wants to do is get in some pussy ASAP.

Suzy’s a good girl. Suzy is the girl you want to marry. But you’re not looking for Suzy now. You’re looking for Kelly Quick-butt, cause she gives up the butt quick. And in 2007, you need not look far to find Kelly. Kelly is everywhere. She’s in your classroom, she’s at the gym, she’s at the corner-store, she’s at the bar. She’s all over the club. You’ve never seen so many girls named Kelly as you’ll see at the club. So from a young man’s perspective, it’s very difficult indeed to keep your eyes on the prize, Suzy Good-Girl, when all these Kelly’s are coming out of the woodwork, promising to be good-for-now. Useless for later, but great-for-now.

Poor Suzy. All she wanted was to be good, and she is forced to choose between being good and lonely, or being bad, and having a great time. If she makes the right choice, she will quickly be out-competed for Timmy’s attention by a bunch of knuckleheaded broads named Kelly.

What’s a good girl to do? The easiest answer is depressingly obvious, Suzy’s gonna take off that school uni, put on some ho-heels and a short skirt, change her name to Kelly, go to the club and become an absolute degenerate, cause that’s better than being the single outcast with no boyfriend. And as guys, it is as much our fault as it is theirs. We have to do our part, but I’m finding it very hard to get takers on board.

Part II: "The Runaway Process"

Let's assume ancestral people started out plain-looking. Then through some minor genetic-shift, females developed a hankering for say, males with large heads. If this big-headed phenomenon happened to occur in bigger, better males, then females who chose them would probably produce more, and healthier offspring. Big-headed genes would proliferate in males, and the preference for them in females. This is all well and good, but sooner or later, conventional knowledge is that females soon come to focus single-mindedly on this trait, regardless of it's correlation with the overall quality of the male anymore.
Thus begins the cycle of runaway one-upmanship: over hundreds and thousands of generations the human head continues to get larger until no self-respecting male can get a date unless he's got that mega-dome. Natural selection steps back in to stop this nonsensical runaway process at the point when the quest for better sexual ornamentation is slowing the males down enough and attracting enough predators to kill them. To a degree, we have lost much of this natural system of checks-and-balances in the modern human world, so the nonsensical runaway system has free reign over the dominion of female sexual preference. This is where everything starts to turn terrible in human world.
In the natural world where the balancing factors are more available, the system proceeds in an orderly fashion. The arctic fox with the "Eat Me" sign wouldn't make it through a single winter with that bullseye on him unless he was very good at out outrunning polar bears. It is this underlying, and necessary consequence of his bold, and risky male behavior that the females reproductive system is attracting her to, often unbeknownst to her.

Why girls like the "bad boy" Pt. I

Excerpts from The Natural History of The Rich - R. Coniff

It's really relegated to nothing more than a vestige of ancestry in the modern human world, but in the natural world, there is a very clear cut answer to this puzzling question. Natural selection basically means that nature weeds out unfavorable traits by killing individuals that display them. Thus an arctic fox with a patch of red fur spelling the words "Eat Me" on it's his side would quickly end up in a polar bear's belly regardless of the bear's illiteracy. Whereas those with more favorable traits like plain white fur for camouflage in the snow will be more likely to survive and reproduce.
In most species, the females control the mating and most of the sexual selection, and they often have an irresistible attraction to the male with the "Eat Me" sign. That is, they seem to select males for traits that make them less likely to survive.
In peacocks for example, the upkeep on a big flashy tail requires the male to waste huge amounts of energy. It also inhibits his ability to fly and makes him more vulnerable to predators. The female's own drab coloration attests to her abiding faith in the value of camouflage, yet she will nontheless choose a male with a bigger showier tail almost every time.
To be fair it works both ways, for example small breasts are just as good as big ones for nursing babies, and in our ancestral environment flat-chested females would also have been better equipped for climbing trees and running from predators. But men like larger breasts, having them is of course a handicap, a cost ancestral women undertook to display greater nutritional fitness in the form of visible body fat in a desirable location.
Given the ruthless efficiency of the natural world, how could such costly displays have evolved in the first place?