Bingeing, Escapism & Modern Addictions - Michael Easter

Why is moderation so hard to achieve? Why can't humans just ever get enough?

It never made sense until maybe, I don't know, the 1970s, to start moderating, (laughs) right? We're a, we're a species that came up in these environments where everything we needed to survive was scarce, food, stuff, information, even number of people we could influence, status, things like that. Um, and so the people who lived on and spread their DNA were people who tended to not try and moderate on those things, right? But the difference is that today we have an abundance of all these things that we're sort of built to crave, if you will, and, um, we still have our old, our old genes that push us into more.

So because we existed for almost all of human history with less than we wanted, less than we needed, we have seen everything as being a fleeting brief amount of abundance in a, an ocean of scarcity. We should take advantage of it right now. Give me more, more, more of everything that's in front.

Yeah. Exactly. Right? In the pa- in the- the... Take food. Food's a great example. In the past, it was hard to find food. You would have to walk around all day, pick it out of the ground, pick it off a tree. You would have to hunt it. You'd have to re- literally run it down until it was exhausted, and then you'd spear it, and then you'd take it home. And so it required effort, and there was never a maximal amount of it. So when you had the opportunity to eat, you wanted to eat as much as possible, and you even still see this today in some tribes where, um... I talked to a, a researcher who was hanging out, I think, with the Ache tribe in Paraguay, and he's like, "These guys came upon this orange bush, and they literally ate oranges until they threw up, and then they ate more oranges." (laughs) Right? 'Cause that sort of behavior gave you a survival advantage in the past 'cause you would put on that, those extra calories as, as fat. And in the times when you inevitably encountered a scarcity and you were starting to lose weight, uh, you would have something to draw on. We still have that exact same drive. In a world where... Now that you live in the US you can identify with this, where there's a 7-Eleven on every corner (laughs) pumping out Coca-Cola and Slurpees and bags of food, and we've got... You know, I live in Vegas. There's buffets where people will go up, you know, 10 times, and, uh, that often backfires. But it's not just... Of course it's not just food, right? It's all these other things. It's like, the average person today owns more than 10,000 items in a house, right? We see more information, some researchers think, in one day than the average person 700 years ago would have seen in their entire life. And so it's all these different things that used to give us a survival advantage, overdoing them, we now have an abundance of them and continue to overdo them.