January 2026

Evolution and the Evaluation of an Epoch

If you were to design a society that is as far as possible from our hominid ancestors' environment, it might look something like ours. It’s not merely that our society is out of sync with the environment we evolved to live in—it clashes. It cuts against our instincts, leaving open psychic wounds. The wounds are continuously agitated.

Some people feel nostalgia for the 1990s—Clinton, Tom Hanks movies, the first personal computers, or the 1950s with its post-war jubilee, Elvis, and Ice Cream parlors. I feel nostalgia for 2 million BCE. The common response to this attitude is some appeal to the brutalities of pre-modern life—infant and childbirth mortality, the absence of anesthetics and modern conveniences. Boredom.

We experience a different kind of boredom today, the kind that arises from desensitization. The numbness that sets in when all the input stops, having juiced the brain’s pleasure center dry. When the rag can no longer be rung. Images that used to tantalize appear flat, reduced back to their pixels. This is also boredom.

Were our primitive ancestors, somewhere along the evolutionary ladder between ape and homo-sapiens, bored?

I feel nostalgic for open skies, stars, and horizons with nothing built on them. The cacophony of rivers, rocks, and birds. The unspooling of the sun through threes. The magnetic feeling of time being drawn out slowly.

Even now, we know that any sample of this is sharply limited. Limited, if not by an alert or a helicopter chopping up the airwaves, it’s limited by our conception of time and the urgency packed into it.

Value and Memory

Of the complaints lodged against the pre-modern era, the pre-agricultural era, childbirth mortality is the strongest. Infant mortality is tragic for those who care about the infant, it’s less obvious how tragic it is for the infant itself. As for all the shiny objects of late modernity, I’m less convinced.

One piece of evidence in favor of late modernity, that we are better off with all the shiny things—the internet, smartphones, social media, apps, streaming services, air conditioning—is that these things that are not necessary, but nice, are used constantly. Yet, we shouldn’t assume that because a thing or service is used continuously that it is desired, or even liked. Users may enjoy any of the shiny things at the outset, and it’s refreshing after being deprived of them for some amount of time to reintroduce them. But what about after continued use?

I’ve read that, for many of those who “abuse substances,” pejoratively called “addicts,” that beyond a certain threshold, use is no longer to get high, but to stay normal. Perhaps it’s a mistake to draw such a deep distinction between addicts and “normal people.” Almost everyone I know is addicted to caffeine, myself included. It’s not hyperbole. These people, we, we people, are genuinely addicted to caffeine. When it’s not present, its absence is disruptive. Its absence breaks lines of thought, it smears a barely translucent gauze across our mind-sight. It makes everything feel blunt, and the body bulky. We factor in ten, twenty minutes in a busy morning to wait in line—for coffee. We spend how much money across a week or a month on this substance? Why do we act like this is cute? Normal? Not-worth-mentioning?

There is the first sip of coffee, and then there are all the others. The point is the hit of caffeine, as anyone who tries weaning with decaf knows. The caffeine high has a half-life. Then it’s just dehydration. It’s a mouth that tastes burnt and stale. It’s having to defecate urgently. It’s feeling shaky and strung out. We have amnesia about this. We have amnesia about the guilt from spending too much at corporate and posh coffee shops. What we remember is the first sip. The first sip is magic.

How many other substances are like this? Are they all like this? Is everything non-necessary like this?

Our memory seems biased towards the peak pleasure at (in this case) at the outset of something, part of the well-documented peak-end rule.[1] Yet what do we consider “the end”? We don’t count buyer's remorse or the crash as “part of it.” But it is part of it. It’s all one process, like fractals.

There’s a deep cultural distinction between the “street dweller” or “junkie” and the middle-class consumer. This distinction is buoyed by the striking physical presentation of someone who is both homeless and addicted to drugs, wherein an observer can dub them dejected, irrational, and trapped by their addiction. By comparison, the middle-class consumer seems comfortable, rational, and free, so their participation in late modernity appears volitional—itself a rational act. These are the basic inferences we make. But what about evenings devoured by a doom-scroll, the paychecks plundered by the “buy now” button, the years spent paying interest—on what?

We can’t assume that because we “choose” to keep living in late modernity that it’s better. This is a kind of an inversion of the sour grapes phenomenon. Not: “I can’t have it, so it must be bad,” but “I can’t stop doing it, so it must be good.”

The deep distinction between the “junkie” and everyone else is “incidental-power-functional” (IPF). It’s a cultural motif that wasn’t (likely) engineered or intentionally disseminated, but it continues, and it functions to reinforce power structures.

Time and Stress

I heard someone say once, “It’s difficult to measure a second when waiting for the doctor," which is like saying, “It’s difficult to measure an inch when you’re talking about the length of a needle that’s going to go into your muscle." It's also difficult for a second to account for chatting with an old friend, or for an inch to account for a row of gold coins. A second, like an inch, is a unit of measurement. It is abstract. It’s clock time, or work time. The gittiness of chatting with a friend or the dull, anxious ache of waiting at the doctors'—that’s not abstract. It’s part of our phenomenal consciousness (i.e., it consists of phenomena, rather than abstract units or concepts). It’s more appropriately what we’d call “real.” We’re communicated to about it by our senses (antiseptic smell and bleak décor of the doctor’s office with inappropriately upbeat or sentimental music from the receptionist desk; the dimples in a friend’s cheeks as they stifle a smile at a risqué comment, a crackle of laughter). All that stuff is concrete experience; it’s real time. Seconds, like inches, are always abstract.

The problem, as Erazim Kohak[2] critically pointed out, is that in late modernity we increasingly doubt experience and reduce all things to abstract units. This is in part because our senses have been misleading us for millennia. Where our senses have failed, the instruments of science (including units of measurement) have succeeded in predicting and contextualizing what’s happening around us, thereby giving us control. So now we think, “Wow, that was only an hour? It felt like five minutes!” See, in that statement, how we defer to clock-time as a higher-order truth? We think of our experience itself as an illusion, flattening it, and relocating our awareness to the abstract.

In reality, experiential “time” (friend chatting, waiting for a doctor, listening to music, watching a dog play, working a mind-numbing job, being stuck in traffic, swimming) is not time—it is change that time as a construct is trying (often obliquely) to measure. Interestingly, in moments of intense pain or pleasure, these means of quantification often lose their grip. We experience being "outside time."

The borderline cases are perhaps where time bears down the strongest, cases where we are stressed in anticipation of either being deprived of something pleasurable or confronted with something painful. An interesting empirical problem is whether stress accelerates our perception of time’s passing or our perception of change. Stress is often a motivator for recalling the past or looking into the future. We look to the past because we imagine it was less stressful, or we use it to navigate something causing stress now. We look into the future because we’re stressed about something unpleasant impending, and would like to mitigate it if possible. Nietzsche thought pain was the basis of memory. Is stress foundational to time-consciousness?

If there is a defining word of the modern moment, “stress” would be a serious contestant. When we are stressed, the clock does not move faster; we are not losing time in that sense. Something does seem scrubbed away, though, in all the shuffling of a stressful moment, or perhaps expunged in the stressed but motionless interim of waiting for what's next (a "waiting" that is often itself crowded with more doing because of the ever-present smartphones). What is lost? For one, we lose possibility—the space in which something else could have been noticed, thought, felt, or just experienced before that space was folded into the sequence of behaviors determined by the demands of the late modern moment, often the demands of the calendar and clock: at once artificial and immanent.

If there is a pursuit of freedom worthy of late modernity, it would seem reclaiming that space by breaking the sequence is an important step.

[1] https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclopedia-of-be/peak-end-rule/

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/317739.The_Embers_and_the_Stars