an extended meditation on presence (we also have chickens)
It's a gross, rainy, wet, muddy day here on the World's Tiniest Farm. But I needed carrots and it's about to be a gross, snowy, icy, muddy night and rest of week here, so I picked up my spade and went out to the front garden to get some.
(Yes, you can overwinter carrots in the ground. I try to have all mine dug by the end of January at the latest, because the voles start de-hibernating mid-February, and they sure do love an all-you-can-carrot buffet right out of their winter naps. But they'll stay good right up through spring. If you leave them they'll even put out flowers and seeds their second year. Press 1 for more Garden Facts.)
The carrots are in the front garden because that's where the alliums are; the alliums are in the front garden because they deter the deer from eating my bulb flowers. My neighborhood is one of those sackasses* popular in Car-Addicted Suburbia, so it's full of people walking their dogs in all weather. Thus, anytime I'm digging overwintered carrots, at least one passing neighbor gives me a weird look. As if anyone could enjoy digging muddy carrots in December rain.
I do, though. Until recently, I couldn't explain why. Reading DOPAMINE NATION (see previous post) is helping with that too, though.
Broad Paraphrase Incoming: See, humans evolved as persistence predators and hunter-gatherers generally. We evolved to work for our rewards and thus to derive pleasure from "work in anticipation of reward" slightly more than from the reward itself. It's not some subjective "preference" that makes me like carrots more after I've gone out in the cold rain to dig them out of the mud with a spade and my own two hands; it's thousands of years of genetic hardwiring, generation after generation of remixes over the same basic backbeat.
I like my carrots more when I work for them. AND SO DO YOU. You (likely) just live in a world that never requires you to work for those carrots - that has taught you that our species' greatest success is in ensuring you never have to work for them - and so you have no idea that's the case.
To be clear: What most of us call "work" these days is not the kind that lights up our ancient dopamine systems. Most of today's "work" is so divorced from its rewards that it creates a dopamine deficit, which we then rush out to surfeit in the afternoons and weekends with excessive consumption of myriad kinds.
No: what gets our birthright dopamine flowing is exertion directly connected to a reward. We like situations where we can see the progress toward our goal, whether that's stalking a wounded deer or filling a bucket with muddy carrots or stacking a woodpile or covering a wall with paintings. Humans LOVE to do things and see the results of having done them. No bullshit job can give that to us, and none ever will - because the companies employing us to do bullshit are the same companies selling us junk food, Netflix, gambling apps, alcohol, sex, video games, social media, shopping, and everything else we use to compensate for the damage they do to our humanity.
Which is also not to say I'm categorically opposed to video games or all the rest of it. I am very opposed to a society that makes us sick and sells us poison as the cure, however.
Digging my own damn carrots gives me more satisfaction than staring at social media feeds ever did, and I got carrots out of the deal. Social media never even gave me carrots.
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