11 Please the Animal

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We Were Animals First

The key to happiness was covered in episode 2, but the biggest element of it is about being happy, which is found by pleasing the animal.

Ep 2 The Key To Happiness

As an animal we learned to survive and with an animal intelligence we could trigger more complex behaviour that was beneficial. This is our emotions and they are very old and very deep. The older they formed, the more deeper they are the more powerful.

Pain can trigger anger which can destroy the thing that caused the pain. It’s reflexive and in the now.

An ape ancestor discovered fire and then cooking, which gave us more energy from the same usual food sources and with that we grew our brains to have a logic machine on top. As that is where our conscious thinking is, our own sense of self we value it very highly, but is not where our emotions lie. It’s no one really gives a monkeys about the meaning of life but everyone wants the key to happiness.

It’s why Spock became half human with emotional leakage. Same for Data. Emotionless things are boring. A giggle is much more fun.

So for this one we need to junk off the logic stuff and get with pleasing the animal. Speaking of junking off, there is of course there is the obvious one in pleasing the animal but that is just one aspect of our humanity, and I’d also argue it’s an emotional state and off most of the time.

So to get to happiness we need to get to what our animal selves is. The first thing to note is that it’s in the now. The concept of a future arrived with the more machine part of us. Effectively we are genetically programmed. A squirrel buries nuts to eat in the future, yes, except that is not why it does it. When it’s eaten it’s full, it wants to bury its nuts now. And later in the winter when its hungry it will find itself in a moment thinking, ‘now I want to grab my nuts’.

If we’re constipated we feel uncomfortable as a continuous now state until we finally go, when we feel a great sense of relief, possibly with a moment of tremendous joy.

The immediacy of the animal is also proven by things like stress. Our fairly new mechanical brain has a format error with the old animal. It plugs the concept of a future issue into the now fight or flight system, keeping us in a state we’ve not evolved to stay in.

Pain is another example. It’s a now thing. Along with being hot or cold. If you are one can you remember the other? Only conceptually.

What is the Secret?

So what is the secret, the key to it all. Easy enough once you know. Game your own system and synchronise the animal to the machine, or as people generally know it, align the mind and body. If your work is mentally exhausting end your day with a hard gym session so your body is physically exhausted too if your body is physically exhausted Some kind of manual labour give yourself a puzzle to work out stay in mind and body. This stuff is anti-stress as you are giving the animal what it needs to match the machines decisions. You are consciously coding your logic to a now format.

If you want to learn better use the animal. You’re evolved and evolution doesn’t care. It just finds the optimum path. You don’t just see with your eyes, you see with your eyes and your brain. You don’t hear with your ears, you hear with your ears and your brain, don’t speak with your voice, you speak with your voice and your brain. So read the scribble in your book, use your brain to convert it to words and have the vocal part of your brain convert it sound and have that sound picked up by your ears and processed by the auditory part of your brain to feed back in. In other words, saying stuff out loud engages specialised areas you were not using. Use your finger to point and if it’s botany or something, literally smell the roses.

Use your machine brain to think of all the things that would have given you an evolutionary advantage and plug into that.

If you’re hot you can simply get cool glass of water, hear it pour, hold it cold in your hand, feel the cool taste down your throat. Nice right? Why?

Why do we like cold water, hot water but not warm water? Well if you’re at a stream and thirsty, as an animal in our past, we would have drank it. Yet, if we didn’t hear the exhilarated relief of the elk upstream, but we had a distaste for warm water, we would spit it out and wait for it to be cold, unlike that other person who became ill later. So drinking a cold glass of water connects to the survival part of us. It’s deep.

Keeping a sleeping baby warm on your chest will relax you like nothing else. It’s like a switch has been thrown, but then we’ve been mammals for 220 million years so it probably is one. It plugs into the oldest part of genetic survival, which is great because the babies wake up scream also has an evolved response.

We’ve been primates for 100 million years, apes for 60 million years, discovered fire roughly 2 million years ago which allowed us to evolve into humans somewhere between 300,000 to 800,000 years ago.

So ape life is also fairly deep. I explored some of these with my friend, Simon. When one of us got a new job we needed to celebrate. I took us to a champagne bar at the top of the tall building. We could see far and seeing you connect your eyes and maximising input. You can see so much land, resources, it’s a reassuring place to be. Also with the tribe, real estate is a high value and so if you can hold the high ground, then you can feel successful, and that was the point. It wasn’t the champagne that brought finding a new job home. It was the view that let us feel it. It aligned the animal with mechanical assessment.

Another time, we needed calm, so we went to a pub on a river to on the Thames in fact. Your animals knows you won’t be thirsty and probably not hungry you’re on the river. Your machine knows it would be a really bad idea to drink the Thames but it now also knows your animal is an idiot and this makes it calm and happy. You can satisfy yourself with an ice cold pint by the river and the illusion is complete.

If you’re moving somewhere new and it’s tremendous effort, reward yourself. Also your animal doesn’t know the new territory and is concerned for survival, so tell it where you moved to is better and the best way to do that with good food. If it’s by the sea, make it sea food. Tell it the foods good here. A few times I’ve moved and the electricity had been off so the almost instinctive solution was to get some nice fish and chips from the chipy. Listen to the animal. Please the animal.

There is lots you can do to make yourself happy. All you need to do is think about how you animal expressed its knowledge through evolution. Ask yourself the question ‘what is my immediate need?’

It might be to have a kitchen rave and pogo about or perhaps you need to feel confident, so brush off the now old tradition of playing a power tune to connect the emotion. To be happy, you just need to be happy. Now go off and play with yourself!