When humans began to trade nomadic life for settlements, we created values to help govern societies. It's helped us evolve from farming wheat to generating significant technological advances and boosting our cognitive capacity for empathy, to name a few things.īecause we create societal values, we can determine which values hold the most meaning.
But humankind's instinct to cater to ourselves also has some positives. It's nearly impossible to break the luxury trap cycle: It's spawned by our biological desire to make life easier so we can conserve time, energy, or money. Immediate email correspondence was a luxury that has become a 21st-century necessity, spawning new obligations to be attached to our phones. Now, we send and receive dozens of emails every day, many of us considering it a necessity to have email access on our phones for even quicker responses. It's called the luxury trap: As Harari puts it, "luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations." For example, we used to mails letter when we had something to say. To put it into today's terms, the pursuit of an easier life often generates greater hardships. So why did we invest time and energy into farming anyway? According to Harari, farming fulfilled our biological needs by helping communities settle down, give birth to more babies in a shorter amount of time, and feed a larger number of people on a smaller space of land. Yet some of our evolution's disadvantages heavily outweighed the advantages.įor instance, in the development of the agricultural revolution, humans found that wheat was incredibly difficult to farm, not economically secure, and not even that nutritious. The early developments of Homo sapiens were entirely biological, centered around sustaining and creating life.
Self-preservation is a biological instinct that greatly impacted the course of humankind - and explains some of our problems today.
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