We stand halfway between two points.
If you want to imagine the future of humanity, imagine a man experiencing the same joy at the thought of checking his emails as you do seeing a long-lost friend.
Summary: The author argues that modern humans exist in evolutionary tension between ancestral desires and civilizational demands, using the metaphor of a seal-dog—a creature halfway between two evolutionary states. While biological impulses drive desires for natural living (unbounded freedom, ancestral ways, sensory indulgence), modern society requires conformity and restraint, leaving people to seek refuge in escapist fantasies. The author proposes that humanity's future will be shaped by those rare individuals who actually enjoy modernity's obligations rather than merely tolerating them.
“The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all the Future, is ever a ‘New Era’ to the thinking man; and comes with new questions and significance, however commonplace it looks: to know it, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of knowledge for all of us.” — Carlyle
Ever since we moved out to Loudoun County from Palo Alto, I’ve been working out of my home office. Now, of course, this has many advantages—including my commute being comically short—and many disadvantages—the lack of IRL coworkers—but one thing I hadn’t expected is the degree to which it has allowed me to watch the local animals out of my window.
Without doxing myself too much, my office looks out on our balcony and beyond that into a common greenspace that the townhouses all back up against. Since the only way to access it is over the grass that cuts between the blocks of homes, no one ever uses it for anything. The only real exceptions are when I drag our trash out on Thursday, or the Mexican man who comes and cuts the grass once a week during the summer. The lack of Human activity has turned this space into something of a sanctuary for the beleaguered mammals that try to live amongst us.
In particular, the squirrels seem to adore its trees, and you can see them moving about nearly all day: dashing, halting, sniffing the air—their entire bodies seeming to be a tension of quivers and stillness—and then dashing again before pausing, their leg posed in the air as if frozen mid-step. This view Nature and her game theoretic dance has become one of the highlights of my day.
With the watching have come many thoughts about nature and myself. The most salient being the degree to which I represent something halfway between two evolutionary equilibria. I’m like the 100th generation of a dog that went diving for fish in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. In other words, I’m not quite a seal, but I also have no idea how to hunt on land.
Much like this dog, I cannot decide if I love the water and the fish or if I secretly crave a return to my ancestral ways, even if they were abandoned for a reason.
The primary form this tension manifests in is the difference between my “desires” and my “needs.” For example, I am moderately addicted to junk food, and as a result have a persistent ring of fat around my torso that tucks awkwardly into my belt when I sit and is slowly strangling my internal organs. This addiction is the result of millions of years of apex predatory status and a preference for the juicy prime cuts of meat that would have marked moments of intense celebration, but now signify Tuesday afternoon. I know I shouldn’t eat McDonald’s, but I really want to. If french fries had the same caloric profile and made my body feel the same as baby carrots, I would be snacking literally all day on a five-pound tub of fries.
So much of what I “want” is hilariously self-destructive in the context I live in (the context we all live in!), and so, as a result, society has instilled in me a strict code of conduct through socialization. I live like a good bourgeois citizen, of course. I pay my taxes, wait in line, try to promptly respond to emails, and otherwise abide by the etiquette demanded by a diverse industrial society. But what I want to emphasize is how much I fucking hate all of this!
If I really, sincerely asked myself how I wish I could live, the answer is like Tolkien’s elves. In other words, I would like to live in nature eating roasted meat, singing my ancestral songs, and raising a family—young, healthy, wise, and beautiful forever—exposed to nothing but my kind and creed. Or, failing that, like my Northman ancestors before the Romans arrived: doing much the same, but probably dying to a falling tree at 40 with a withered hand.
I try to escape as much as I can—as much as anyone can—through video games, literature, writing, into a simulacrum of this existence. But it is still just that: an illusion I create to make myself feel better. They are the dreams the seal-dog, wet and tired after a day of fishing, has about chasing rabbits—nothing more. Because without our regimented modern life, we all die. Literally.
There are just too many of us to sustain any version of living off the land, and even if we could, it would mean dooming sentience to a slow death with the earth. No: it is our job to settle the stars and to eventually learn to love our new fate, and we are moving there slowly. But the seal-dog still dreams.
The hope is, of course, as always, that it will not last. Already, it seems that only the people who enjoy this life—who do not see the obligations and humdrum monotony of modernity as hellfire but instead just as boxes to be checked—are having children and continuing the species. I would hypothesize that if you could teleport to a Korean elementary school in 1990, the little boys and girls who took actual pleasure in the grind are the ones who now 35 years later have blossoming families.
If you want to imagine the future of humanity, imagine a man experiencing the same joy at the thought of checking his emails as you do seeing a long-lost friend.