We still have a brain that has been trained to focus on threats, to interpret and eliminate them, to escape pain and seek pleasure immediately. However, most of these threats have changed or ceased to exist. Technology has bought us so much time—and so quickly—that it is now impossible for the adaptation system to keep up with such a pace.
We are chasing ghosts. We no longer address our issues of survival to our satisfaction.
Imagine a group of hungry hominids on the African savannah, in search of food. To them, finding highly energetic and fatty food, as well as sweet fruit, meant living longer. However, the search for such things, in the cold, rain and wind, involved suffering. The motivation to wander outside the cave required a reward many times greater than the pain of enduring the elements of nature; otherwise, death from starvation would be a lesser evil.
For this reason, our brain has learnt to produce dopamine when it encounters fat and sugar.
In modern times, you leave your home and make your way to the local snack bar, where you find all this food. It does not require you to spend any energy, but your brain nonetheless gives you the same reward. You end up gaining weight and, as a result, you shorten your lifespan.
The prevailing threats of today are depression, obesity and attractions that do not tend to our needs of nutrition or perpetuation of the species. These things distract us from the opportunities we need to see in order to grow. These threats are much more dangerous. While their consequences manifest themselves in the long term, our brains are only capable of feeling pleasure and pain in the short term.
Nowadays, we feel immediate satisfaction when we buy something we do not need, with money we do not have, to impress people we do not know.
In the past, our reward system worked towards our survival. In the present, it works against our quality of life.
We must learn to shift our focus from the threats that no longer exist to those that do exist in our day. We must also learn to anticipate pleasure and avoid long-term pain.
We are frightened by the products of a world that is changing ever more rapidly, because this world is interpreted by a brain whose adaptation system takes millions of years to identify new threats.
We can only speed up this process if we know how to shift our focus, so as to navigate through pleasure and pain in order to find better solutions.
A certain formula that has worked in the past leads to the expectation that it will always work. It evolves into a sure-fire recipe, and it serves as an excuse to dismiss new solutions. This kills creativity, and it kills the possibility of seeing real opportunities. In fact, nothing can ensure that past success will repeat itself in the future. The prevailing conditions undergo constant changes, which justify the search for new measures.
The only certainty we can afford is that things change. They change quickly. Just when we think we have all the solutions, the problems change.
The danger never lies in the things that we do not know. It lies in the things that we know: more precisely, it lies in those things that have ceased to be true.
Due to the need to be right, to cling on to truths, however obsolete, we give in to the inertia that traps us in our comfort zone. And this prevents us from spending the energy required to exercise creativity.