At its core, every human pursuit, from forming identities to building civilizations, traces back to a single biological imperative: the drive to pass on our genes. This ancient program manifests in three desires:
- To survive: ensuring our own continued existence
- To reproduce: finding a mate and creating offspring
- To provide: safeguarding the quality and success of our offspring, securing our lineage into the future
All human systems, hierarchies, and psychological frameworks are extensions of this evolutionary script.
For example, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs reflects this logic clearly:
- Physiological & Safety Needs serve our desire to survive.
- Love and Belonging fulfil our instinct to find mates and form tribes.
- Esteem & Self-Actualisation can be seen as mechanisms for improving our desirability as a mate and, once we have children, finding profound purpose in ensuring their quality and future success.
Dopamine's Role in the Modern World
Our brains are wired to encourage survival-promoting behaviours through dopamine, which is the neurochemical of motivation, pleasure, and reward. Our ancestors recevied dopamine boosts for eating calorie-dense food, finding safe shelter, forming social bonds, and having sex. Natural selection thus wired our reward systems to reinforce these acts.
In modern society, we’ve replaced physical survival cues with abstract proxies. We chase money, fame, and status, not for their own sake, but because they signal competence and resourcefulness to others, enhancing our perceived mating and survival value. Yet, this same system that once ensured adaptation now works against us.
The illusion of success:
We’ve engineered supernormal stimuli and artificial experiences far more potent than anything found in nature. Pornography simulates reproductive success without intimacy. Social media mimics social validation without real connection. Junk food delivers concentrated calories devoid of nutrition. Drugs and gambling directly hijack the brain’s reward system, manufacturing an illusion of monumental success.
By constantly indulging in these hyper-stimulating activities, we trick our brains into believing we’re thriving, when in reality we’re degrading our health, relationships, and resilience. The pursuit of endless pleasure becomes a path to endless pain.
The Trap of Hyper-Competition:
Our drive for status, once a tool for ensuring our offspring’s survival, can become self-destructive. Sacrificing sleep and health for wealth erodes the very vitality we seek to display. Hoarding resources for personal gain breeds social instability and conflict, conditions that ultimately endanger everyone’s offspring, including our own.
In striving for our own gene's propagation, we create conditions that threaten the very survival we seek.
The Solution: Zi Ran (自然) and the Expansion of the Self
In a hyper-connected world, our evolutionary interests must expand. The most adaptive path is not selfish accumulation but alignment with Zi Ran (自然)—“self-so” or harmony with the natural order.
This shift requires two transformations:
- From self-serving to service: We must recognise that helping others survive and flourish is not altruism in opposition to our genes, but an evolutionary strategy. By contributing to a healthy, stable, and collaborative community, we create an ecosystem where our own offspring have the safest, most nurturing environment to thrive. Their survival is inextricably linked to the survival of our shared human tribe.
- From counterfeit pleasure to productive pain: We must consciously choose activities that generate long-term, genuine fitness over short-term, illusory rewards. These are activities that are difficult and unrewarding in the moment but build the foundation for real-world fitness and well-being. For example, running is physically strenuous but builds a healthy, resilient body, which is key for survival and attraction; focused work & learning is cognitively demanding but develops skills and resources that ensure the quality of our offsprings; building deep relationships requires emotional vulnerability and effort but creates the stable social framework essential for raising successful children.
Conclusion
In a world of hijacked rewards and self-defeating competition, the path to true evolutionary success is counter-intuitive. It lies in aligning with Zi Ran: by focusing on the well-being of the whole, we best ensure the prosperity of our own. By embracing short-term, productive pain for ourselves and extending our care to our human community, we secure the boundless, authentic pleasure that comes from being a vital part of a thriving human legacy. This is how we truly honour our deepest biological purpose: ensuring the optimal survival and flourishing of the human legacy.