Earning Life
Thriving In a Hostile World
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today’s topic addresses a common misunderstanding that our survival in a hostile natural world has become systematized through complex transactional mediums which are misinterpreted as requiring humans to pay to live. We’ll step back from the moral language and dive into evolutionary biology to see the truth.
Every once in a while, I come across an opinion that’s so divorced from reality that I have to really stop and wonder how they got to this point. Recently, it was this gem, right here on Substack, suggesting that we are the only species on Earth that has to pay to live.
Superficially, it almost sounds legitimate; however, it quickly falls apart. Note the switch in language. The post starts with “Pay to live” and then transitions to “Earn the right.” It’s nuanced and sounds similar but hits you with two triggers, attempting the same task but missing what’s actually happening underneath. Let’s break this apart, starting with Paying and then analyzing Earning to better understand the problem.
Paying to Live
This is the hook. He’s not wrong. We have to pay for Land, Water, Shelter, and Food. No other creature on this earth has to pay anything…
Kind of… Notice where your brain went with “Pay.”
Payments are typically made with money, or at least, in our common vernacular, we immediately consider the exchange of currency for goods as payment. The reason is that humans are the only species that uses currency as a transaction medium.
Humans are also the only species that have developed broad-spectrum and highly specialized skills and services across all elements of Land development, Water acquisition, sanitation and delivery, complex Shelter engineering, building and maintenance, and the global farming, harvesting, processing, and distribution of Food. Put another way, humans are the only critters on planet earth for whom the vast majority of us put zero direct labor into developing our land, water, shelter, and food. We just consume what others produce.
And the consumption we have available is that of the ultra-rich just one hundred years ago. Given you’re reading this on Substack, you have access to the internet, a computing device, and the luxury of time. However, most of us have even more. Even the poor have conveniences that were unfathomable just centuries ago, which we, yes, have to pay for.
Likewise, others consume what we produce. I write here on Substack and have published two novels. They’re not necessary for survival, but they help us understand who we are as humans and how to survive better, hopefully even thrive! Which, by the way, if you appreciate these essays, you can help keep them open for everyone by becoming a paid subscriber!
What we just showed is the exchange of currency for goods. Because 20% off, which makes it $24 a year, or $2 a month, or just 50¢ an essay, is a way to demonstrate value using a transaction medium. I’m not bartering for chickens, housecleaning, land, or freshwater because that just doesn’t make sense.
But… if I were your tribal shaman, sharing these counterintuitive insights, helping you understand human psychology and sociology, and even physical health, you would probably hook me up with Land, Water, Shelter, and Food. But these insights would have to be worth that compensation, or I’d have to go do the work myself. Simply put, I don’t have a right to your hard-earned money; I have to earn your support.
Earning the Right to Exist
Now, let’s get to the twist: the post began with payment for Land, Water, Shelter, and Food, then pivoted to earning the right to exist. The simplest read screams injustice when we think of the other creatures on the planet just existing.
But are they? Because if you think those other creatures aren’t working their assess off for those things, you don’t know nature. There is zero unconditional access, and nature is not nice. Every other species has to fight to get land, water, shelter, and food. Hell, most animals eat other animals to get that food.
Every living thing on this planet earns the right to exist on the planet that made us. That’s the fundamental cornerstone of evolutionary biology. Survival of the fittest. If you don’t earn that right, nature will eliminate you, and the fossil record is replete with billions of examples of animals that did not earn the right.
There is no natural right to existence. It is the core foundation of what we explored in the first of the two rules for life. Incidentally, that post reflects the necessity of the second rule of life because it’s cloaked in the moral language of could, should, and ought, and is missing what IS. We have the ability to survive; we don’t have the right.
Any living thing on this planet has to fight, strive, and yes, earn the ‘right’ to be here because not doing so leads to entropy, which ends in decay and death. What makes that meme intoxicating is that entropy is easy, and you see the shift of blame from personal laziness toward the implication that the system is somehow costly and denying the right to existence.
If you take that system away, the effort, counterintuitively, increases. As many of you have observed in survivor-type TV shows like Alone, Outlast, Survivorman, 7 vs. Wild, and the eponymous and long-running Survivor series, the challenges and effort involved in mere existence, unprotected by that system, are epic, and failure is constant. That’s because the right to exist requires fighting to earn it, and the systems that we created help us maintain that right and to allow thriving in a hostile world.
From Surviving to Thriving
The systems humans created foster hyper-specialization, allowing masses of people to put in fractional effort across millions of systems to produce the things we use. A simple example of the depth of economics is the classic story of the pencil, where systems of systems of systems and global supply chains work together to produce a ‘simple’ pencil.
This system, in turn, pays us for our labor, and that payment is in a currency that serves as a medium of exchange, which we use to obtain those things. The whole system created a life of luxury, separated from nature and, ironically, allows people like Frank Bard to post that meme and angrily type away on high-tech keyboards, connected to billions of humans around the world, while enjoying air conditioning and plentiful and safe food and water.
Thriving in this environment means understanding where we actually sit in the natural schema and finding better ways to connect because the root feeling here isn’t wrong. We do feel out of touch with nature as we live in concrete jungles surrounded by artificial… everything. We also have a moral language that’s often divorced from fundamental reality.
For the latter, I recommend you Go Touch Grass. Get out there into nature, get away from the chaos and hustle and bustle.
For the former, for the moral language, once you’re out in nature, I challenge you to watch an ant-hill for more than five minutes. Or a bee’s nest. Or watch the birds. Observe the rabbits constantly looking for threats. What you don’t see there is leisure time; you don’t see rights; you just see them earning their existence day after day after day. You don’t see the moral language in their existence. You see survival.
When you step back to your current situation, with proper grounding in what IS, you can then consider ways to make it better. The catch is to always align your moral language to reality. This balances the first rule of evolutionary biology against the second rule of soul maturation and is the key to thriving.
We do have to earn our right to exist, and we, as humans, have mastered it to the point where we are really thriving in almost every conceivable dimension. Ignoring that risks entropy, whereas appreciating that reality allows us to continue the trend.
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Mostly Harmless Ideas Computer Science for Everyone
The Shepard Scale - Kit Perez - Counter Intelligence Insights
My 2 Cents - Karina Schneidman MBA, MS-MFT
I guess I could opine that man is also the only creature that invests a great deal of effort in strategic virtue signaling in a vain attempt to fool other members of his own species and even himself, but I see the other commenters beat me to the punch...
The only thing our species has "mastered" is the ability to initiate a mass extinction event that is proceeding faster than any in history and will probably wipe us out completely.
Nature is about to eliminate us because of our hubris and belief that we are in control. We thoroughly deserve it. The only people who have a chance of making it through the polycrisis are those Indigenous communities who live in harmony with nature and respect ecological boundaries and planetary limits.