If you aren’t living in a big house, driving a fleet of cars and sporting the latest stereo system, don’t feel so bad. According to Peter Whybrow, author of American Mania: When More Is Not Enough, the material road to happiness does not sit well with our 200, 000 years of ’scarcity-driven evolution’.
The Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA believes our evolution from an environment which barely satisfied our day to day needs to one of plenty, has left us socially incapable of coping with the modern comforts of affluence and material wealth.
Whybrow attributes the Western world’s rise in depression and stress levels to our brains’ internal drive for instant gratification:
In the absence of any controls—any cultural or economic constraints—we are easily hooked on our acquisitive pleasure seeking behaviors…The instinctive brain is well ahead of the intellectual brain. Credit cards promise us that you can have what you want now, and postpone payment until later…Buying just feels good, in a biological sense — and that instant reward outweighs the threat of future bills.
…We’ve been taught, especially in America, that happiness will be at the end of some sort of material road, where we have lots and lots of things that we want…We’ve set up all sorts of tricks to delude ourselves into thinking that it’s fine to get what you want immediately.
You can see Peter Whybrow discuss his new book on the Charlie Rose show here.
[via Wired]
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