The Survival Instinct

As much as I don't like to get my views from pop culture, one movie I pleasantly enjoyed was Saw 2. During the movie, the serial killer spouts philosophical nonsense about how humans have lost their Survival Instinct. The very things we do when we know death is imminent are different than the things we do when we have the luxury of not knowing when we will die. Thus, we go from day to day eating but not tasting, seeing but not adoring, hearing but not understanding... If evolution does stand as a theory, it has lost its value through the birth of man: a being that lives on as the top of food chain yet does not have the "edge" to be there. We throw away our lives with gluttony, sloth, and indifference. The very ones we are suppose to love (family, friends) we push away in selfishness and stubbornness on a regular basis.

While this may very well be true, I don't have cancer nor do I have knowledge of my death. Yet I see the complacency sink in as my goals are or are not accomplished in life. Call it being a guy, but when I don't meet the par I fight hard to get there; and when I finally do I sink back in inactivity and dullness.

We see this everywhere. Girls dress up and put on makeup, and when they finally score the guy they want- they cut their hair and put on weight. Guys improve their character and work hard to impress the girl they like, but when they finally get what they want they sink back to their gaming chairs and computer screens. And it doesn't just apply to sexual relations- careers, hobbies, knowledge... Gov't workers are slow because they can never really lose their jobs, and so any type of work that they do will take much longer (ever been to the DMV?). But these are all in the context of marginal survival. If you want to be accepted socially, you need a spouse, a job, and an interesting personality. None of this relates to actual life and death.

We live in a world that has removed conflict from our lives, and that confuses us. Civilization has removed all danger of death from us, and so we turn to society to give us answers on how to get that "edge" to survive. Boys fight and play with guns for the first 5 years of their lives, and then the next 10 years they are taught that guns and fighting is bad. Now I'm not making any judgement calls on parenting or how things "should be", but I think that we are wired in some way that is evident in how our lives should have been lived. After all, we are definitely different from the other animals and so maybe our challenge is figuring out what exactly we are to do with that difference.

I'm boring myself and losing track of what I originally wanted to post.

I don't want to be complacent. In 20 years I don't want to lose my push, my edge, my focus in any of the hobbies or aims that I have in life. I look at so many of the older people I know and they are quite simply lethargic and single minded corporate robots. Now, raising a family probably had quite a bit to do with that, but what role models would we be if we don't start pushing ourselves now? It should never stop, I think. We should always strive to be better. And I just realized this is the speech that landed me a job.

Maybe I'll continue this post later. Happy thanksgiving.