How the reward system evolved
“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something”
Robert Heinlein
The reward system is very old. It evolves over timespans of hundreds of thousands of years. Our culture on the other hand has changed very dramatically in the last 2000 years. Because of this we are very poorly adapted to modern life. The positive rewards and the effective strategies become increasingly misaligned. For example, it was once effective to be lazy. Too much activity meant, in the absence of medical care, a high risk of injury and consequent death. Therefore the reward system rewards us for doing the necessary minimum. Nowadays to be lazy does not make any sense at all anymore: any injury can be fixed by medicine and most activities (like working in an office) are not dangerous anyway. The result of this increase in misalignment is that we have to force ourselves more and more to do things which are not rewarded by the reward system (we don’t enjoy sitting in offices but still we force ourselves to do it). This problem will get worse, the more our living conditions differ from the conditions hundred thousand years ago.
We could find thousands of such examples. Sadly in our modern world „self discipline“, the ability of the intelligent agent to act willingly against the reward system, has become an important skill for humans. This is something very unnatural, animals can’t do it at all. Animals do in every moment what makes them most happy.
Therefore we have only two choices in the long run:
- We can try to modify the reward system using drugs and (in the future) genetic modifications. This could make us „love“ the world we have created. In an uncontrolled way this is already happening: some people are taking all kinds of drugs to perform better or to feel good. Personally I don’t think we should choose this option because it is very difficult to implement successfully and does not solve the many other problems of a competitive system.
- We can change our society in a way that our living conditions are, at least in some aspects, closer to the ones we lived in thousands of years ago.
If we want to opt for the second option, we have to ask the question of how this living conditions actually were at the time when our reward system was shaped. Most likely we lived in tribal communities, where intense cooperation was required to survive. This means evil behavior was mostly only effective when directed against other tribes, and not members of the own tribe. So most of the time we probably lived very cooperatively and therefore our reward system has evolved in a way which makes us enjoy this kind of lifestyle.
We are not designed for the exclusively and increasingly stressful and competitive lifestyle of our modern world. It makes us deeply unhappy.