How Are We So Evolved and Yet So Primitive At the Same Time?

My son Lyle and I went to Seattle this weekend. As we were wandering around, I felt struck by the enormity of human achievement.

I found myself looking out the window of our hotel room at the other skyscrapers and thinking, “Wow, human beings figured out how to identify and extract materials from the earth, how to combine and turn them into new materials that could then be used to construct giant buildings that can we can safely work and live in, even 1000 feet off the ground.”

I found myself looking at the Port of Seattle and thinking, “Wow, human beings figured out how to build something that can traverse the oceans, how to efficiently invent and invent and create all kinds of products — food, clothing, furniture — and then how to transport them from one part of the world to another, pretty much connecting all people and places.”

I found myself walking by Amazon’s offices and thinking, “Wow, human beings figured out how to not only take human expression and interaction and capture it in bits and bites but then create an entire digital world that lives alongside the physical world.”

I found myself walking past the endless Starbucks, also created and headquartered in Seattle, and thinking, “Wow. Human beings figured out that you can take the seed of a coffee plant, find the bean, roast it, combine it with hot water, spread the idea globally and create sustenance that then energizes the body and mind and becomes a daily ritual enjoyed by billions.”

We take most of this for granted because if you just spent all of your time just thinking “wow,” you’d never actually get anything done. In fact, it’s that innate drive towards the future that allows humans to keep figuring things out — incredible things, to keep advancing, to keep evolving.

Human beings are amazing.

And yet at the same time, you then look at the world and can’t help but think, “Wow, human beings are awful.”

You look at the Epstein saga and think “human beings prey on the weak, take advantage of each other, use each other. And then they endlessly speculate and rejoice every time another human fails so they can feel morally superior.”

You look at the war in the Ukraine and think “human beings, in this case Vladimir Putin specifically, just choose to literally destroy other human beings for no reason other than ego, insecurity and greed. It’s not even like animals who kill to eat. They’re just killing to kill. They value human life that little even though it’s literally all we have.”

You look at world leaders across the globe who have the chance to do so much good with their power and instead consistently put their own needs, their own power, their own ego, their own greed first — pitting people against each other, sewing hate and division and bloodshed just so they can stay on the throne and keep pulling the strings.

And it’s everywhere. For example, we just finished the legislative sessions for our work at Solving Hunger to try to make sure every kid gets school breakfast and lunch. We saw people like Ohio House Speaker John Huffman or Oregon Senator Kate Lieber and Oregon Representative Tawna Sanchez (both progressive Democrats) have the chance to pass legislation that would provide meals in schools to kids who desperately need it and choose not to either because of their own political needs or even because of just their own misplaced anger and self loathing. You see, as detailed so well in Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s Abundance, Democrats on the far left who proudly display lawn signs proclaiming their love and tolerance for everyone then regularly deny poor people affordable housing.

At the Mobile Voting Project, we are finishing the code that will make it secure for everyone to vote in elections on their phones (it will be free for anyone to use) and you will then no doubt see politicians from both parties do everything they can to block making it easier to vote because it could threaten their own hold on power.

There’s so much good in the world. There’s so much bad. There’s so much progress. There’s so much primality.

Human beings are, if nothing else, extraordinarily complicated. We know right from wrong but we don’t automatically choose it. We want love and acceptance and yet we constantly turn on each other and try to improve our own standing by lowering others. We struggle constantly between a zero sum mindset that pits all of us against each other and an abundance mindset that knows that the key to happiness is other people. And it’s so hard. I make the wrong choices constantly (literally minutes after the first draft of writing this, I found myself in the elevator of the hotel, hearing another door on my floor open and hitting the door close button repeatedly so I wouldn’t have to say good morning to a stranger.)

Some people might be a little more naturally inclined towards love and abundance. Some are a little more inclined towards selfishness and evil. But most people are just doing their best while trying to navigate constant, conflicting advice on which way to think and live — “love thy neighbor” vs “it’s either us or them.”

Maybe the answer is as simple as “we’re still evolving.” Human beings in our current form are, by most estimates, not more than 100,000 years old, with a lot of experts pegging it at little more than half that. By comparison, the earth is 4.5 billion years old and the universe is nearly 14 billion years old. Maybe in a million years — if we somehow survive that long — humans won’t face the mental struggles we do today. Maybe choosing each other, choosing love, choosing abundance will just be the natural choice we always make (or maybe we’ll be exactly the same as we are now but we’ll grow wings or something).

I suppose the true challenge and opportunity of being human is making that choice as best you can each time. It’s a constant struggle. For all of us. But the world we’ve built also tells us we can do remarkable things with the tools we already have. Yes, human emotions are clearly more complicated to master than science or systems, but we can still apply those same skills, that same ingenuity and resilience and brilliance to the way we not only discover and build and invent ideas and objects but to the way we treat each other too.

We would be so much happier if we did.