The Roots of Our Human Nature

Nowadays we are not just material but digital hoarders as well! Multitasking, too much on our plate, want too much? Frustration, anxiety and depression can crawl onto us silently without us even noticing it.
Are you a life-long learning because of or despite your school experiences? Would you attend a non-traditional life-long academy?
Our Homo Sapiens ancestors had gone through many bottleneck experiences and we are the only human species that survived. Do you wonder why that is? Would you like to know how much is nature in us and how much is instilled by culture?
Are you one of those people who want to grow and want to live a meaningful life and not some virtual lives offered by the entertainment industry? Then you belong with us!
Binary thinking is everywhere, no fifty shades of gray, only black and white, good or bad, right or wrong. Does it disturb you sometime?
Think and explore with us!

Title: The Roots of Our Human Nature

Chapter 1: Hello and welcome to Let Your Genius Emerge podcast! We made it to the fourth episode in season one. The title of this episode is the Roots of Our Human Nature. I would love to sit down and have coffee with you and get to know you! Yes, I am a coffee person, and would love to find out if you are too. Until we can actually do that, here is Julia Bright, your host serving you your imaginary drink for our imaginary chat.

How did you like the minimalist approach I was suggesting last week? This is when knowing your needs comes handy. It isn’t just your bed and toothbrush that serves your needs but your communication devices, reference books, family car as well. Nowadays we are not just shopaholics hoarding material stuff but over-accumulating digital data. It is also getting out of hand and creates anxiety in us for several reasons.

Whether it is material or digital, it gets unorganized after a while and finding things becomes impossible. So you have invested time, money and energy in something that gets completely lost, which sounds counterproductive. But you can’t even begin to get organized because you get frustrated within the first 15 minutes and then just leave it to be as it is. No. 38 of the Delphic maxims still apply: Nothing in excess. Of course, it is not profitable in the consumer society. You are encouraged to buy, spend money, make profits - for someone else, meanwhile you need to deal with the excess that is put it in boxes and storages, or you buy extra cloud space to store your extra data.

That is my point. If you have a system from the beginning you would know where to insert things as you go and wouldn’t buy two of the same or something that you wouldn’t even use. A smart coworker of mine I shared a room with for a while at the beginning of my career told me that it is easy to keep your place tidy, you just have to put things back where you took them from and when you buy something that you need you assign a space to it right away. But I was too free spirited at the time and I loved to work on many things at the same time. Sounds familiar, Gen Z?

But we need to be careful because multitasking can lead to anxiety and cause frustration. We start beating ourselves up before even others would have a chance to do the same to us. See, we like to blame others for making us feel anxious, angry or frustrated but the sad truth is we generate these feelings within ourselves. We let these feelings overcome us. No, I don’t put the blame on you because then I would also put the blame on myself, I am the same way. To become resilient and strong builds up from childhood. As an adult it comes with a lot of struggle. So this is a journey that includes anxiety, frustration, depressive mood swings, reaction to other people’s behavior and feedback rather than just being an observer and stop reacting right away. Martin Seligman wrote about depression in the nineties on how to develop optimism in a child. He pointed out that depression became an epidemic and our children were the victims. This is why I am raising this issue and I will come back to it again. We need to know what is happening because we are part of the social cushioning for each other and we need to be able to communicate effectively to address these problems. Depression cannot be solved without the help of the community!

The children Martin Seligman wrote about are adults now, they are you, so if you are facing issues and you think the reason is the pandemic, well it is only partially true.

So catch yourself, observe your thoughts and feelings and try to control your actions. This way you can nip the problems as soon as they arise.

Take it slowly, step by step.

Chapter 2: I have a dream that has kept me going in times when I saw no reason to go on, or even when I changed career paths and I had to provide for my family by working within a company that gave me ethical dilemmas. Being a teacher at heart, always, I dreamt about raising new generations by giving them all the tools they needed to grow intellectually, personally, and mentally with critical thinking. I found schools are authoritative and do not want to give the students power over their own learning, their own growth. They say then children and teenagers would not do any studying if it were up to them. And they are right. Children would not want to do the boring drills and rote learning, meaningless homework assignments if it were up to them, for sure! They would rather do something interesting! Something that captures their imagination and they can submerge themselves in it! It would take a lot of work from the teacher slash coach at the beginning but slowly the students would be more and more independent and work in groups and challenge each other. It can’t be done, you say? It is being done in Finland. And it is why more and more parents opt to educate their children at home.

Now I call it Humanly Genius Academy where I did develop a Life-Long Learning program. I would never call it a school, and it would not involve sitting in rows of desks either. I would even be cautious to use the word subjects because people have developed bad associations with school and anything related to it over the years. I remember at the end of middle school, some of my grade eight classmates destroyed all their books and notes on the last day of school. I still have this image in my mind. So I am hesitant to use the word subjects. They are areas of interest, there are seven of them all together, the first one is Health and Life skills. Getting to know ourselves as humans, as persons, why we do what we do would be part of this exploration. Physical and mental health is part of this curriculum for all age groups, from infants to seniors. I imagine this academy a truly life long learning experience. We would assist parents to explore their children’s capabilities, parents would help their infants to be the best they can be for their age and for themselves, and everybody could progress at their own pace with help from their coaches and their peers.

I wonder what you think about my ideas based on your experiences of the schools you went to and your education.

Chapter 3: I would widen the perspective in this academy. We have been dissecting our needs in the last two episodes, the way Maslow saw them and the way we restructured them. Now we can go back in time and see how our species satisfied their needs at the beginning. It is important for us to know what is inherent and what is cultural in us. Do you think our ancestors suffered from depression?

I am having a hard time using the word human ancestors because it is very ambiguous. We will deal with that later, for now let’s say that our mitochondrial Eve and Adam lived about 200 thousand years ago, that is about 10 thousand generations ago, and we got our X and Y genes from them. They are not the biblical Adam and Eve and they were not the first ones to have these X and Y genes. They did not even live at the same time but as our species almost did not make it through, only their genes passed onto all seven billion plus of us. It took another hundred thousand years to shape us to become the way we are today. About 5 thousand generations ago our ancestors tried to go from Africa to Asia and Europe, they were successful at that but not successful at staying there. 60 thousand years and, about 3 thousand generations ago however, finally they succeeded and started to populate Asia, Europe, Indonesia and Australia. At that time they lived along with at least six other cousins. Homo erectus had lived in Asia for over a million years, they were the most successful human species ever lived. Homo Floresiensis were the hobbits, living on an island in Indonesia the way they adapted is by becoming small. They lived until about 50 thousand years ago. Some of us still carry the genes of Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo denisova, a reminder that some mating was still possible.

Scientists wonder however, how is it that our ancestors actually met six of our cousins and none of them have made it through?

Also how come that none of the largest animals like the mammoth, the saber tooth tiger could survive. Wherever humans arrived, large animals and mammals went extinct.

We need to live with this nature of ours as a species.

When there were no more large animals to drive to extinction, people turned against each other. Genocide, wars where a few manipulate large masses to do their bidding and risk their lives for the interest of those few? They really needed to make up an appealing story for that!

But what I really wanted to address is the time before the wars and manipulation. Our ancestors were not aware that their hunting 50 thousand years ago had consequences so serious that within a few thousand years those animals would disappear completely!

They were in survival mode, and that is what I want to talk about. They all lived at the First level. There was no exception! Yes, they had fresh air, EXCEPT WHEN THEY WENT THROUGH the Tobo catastrophe 74 thousand years ago, a large volcano eruption that gave our ancestors 3700 generations ago a bottleneck experience.

Then fresh water, which was harder to find during the ice age 20 thousand years ago, just as food and a safe place to sleep. Warmth is interesting. Homo Erectus used fire on a regular basis as long as 300, 000 years ago. So did the Neandertals and Homo Sapiens. It provided light and warmth, safety, some disinfecting, killing germs and parasites with cooking food, it was a digestive aid, needed less energy to chew food and digest it. By about 50,000 years ago our ancestors used needles to make clothes, boots and tents to survive in the cold. Remember, by that time Homo Sapiens was conquering the North! And here comes sex! They needed to pass on their genes for us to be here today! There were some bottlenecks but our ancestors pulled through albeit with a very homogeneous genetic homo sapiens population of today. No cousins left, the differences between us are so tiny it’s altogether 0.1%. I usually say we are 98.5% chimpanzee and 50% bananas.

Back to our ancestors though, they lived on a constant survival level, with strong social cushioning. They cared for the weak and the old, they buried their dead and they embellished the burial site. They all cared for the children, there was no nuclear family, the responsibility was shared. See, the mortality rate at child birth was high, and 25% of children did not live past the age of 5. Cooperation was vital for survival, no legislation was needed. It is still vital for survival today we just need to recognize it. They went hunting, gathering, fishing, they got together and they groomed each other and they started to tell stories. Language developed further. Art developed, however they were just expressing themselves. But that is what art is supposed to be. By 50,000 years ago, 2500 generations back our ancestors were just like us. If one of them happened to be born here, they could learn anything we learn today. They would not be able to digest some food like milk, and processed food, but they could learn a language, they could comprehend concepts and they would have complex feelings. They would search for their identity too and they would desperately want to fit into their community and society.

Up until about 600 generations ago they lived equally trying to survive living through the ice age. Then Earth started to warm up. Within fifty years they definitely felt the change themselves. Climate change gave new opportunities to different tribes and they lived with them. By 10,000 years Before the Common Era there was only one human species left on earth and its population was about one million.

We need to understand ourselves as a species to dig deeper and see how tradition and culture shaped us. We might think we are so different from our great grandparents from 1000 or 600 generations ago, but we breathe, eat, sleep and survive the same way. Even our emotions are similar. I find it is a great relief for me to have a human foundation in me and I don’t actually need to reinvent myself completely in this highly individualistic society!

I wonder if you agree with me so far. Did you find it helpful to sort out your own needs separating them from your desires? How do you feel about having great grandparents from 2500 generations ago, who connect you with half of the earth’s population today being just about the same as we are now, having the basic feelings and needs as we do?

I think it is a great start to sort out who we are and what we are about as people and as individuals.

And that leads me to a question that I am often asked nowadays and I am having a hard time to answer. I wonder if you can guess why.

Chapter 4: I am asked who my podcast is for? What is my niche? I do have a hard time putting it into words, because I am thinking about all my students and all the people I have cared about over the years. I wanted to help out, when I saw something in them that they never noticed within themselves. I sensed what they could have become were they given the right tools from birth. If their parents had known how to nurture growth, not just care for their child’s immediate needs. I saw missed opportunities and the lost shine in their eyes.

I want to speak to the 99% of the people who are really making the world turning, who are really making history but who never get credit for anything. I do not care for the 1% who think they are privileged, they are entitled and their names should be everywhere. They are not worth even mentioning as far as I am concerned. The people who built the historical buildings, who feed the world, who get up and make all that we can buy day by day, who serve us daily even during the pandemic, they deserve to be mentioned and raised up. They deserve to get more knowledge, more tools to become more self assured, more confident, more powerful to fend for themselves.

I know they might not look for me though and that is ok. I would not have been ready for myself at certain times of my life either. I just hope that their journey at some point of time will cross with my ideas. For now however I want to seek people who feel the need to grow. Who does not get satisfied by the everyday routine of life.

I am looking for people who want to live their own lives. But doesn't everyone? No, most people don’t. They watch soap operas and popular tv serieses every day and night, living the lives of their favorite characters. They argue over what these characters should or should not do in the future and they get angry with the writers! I watched The Handmaid's Tale based on Margaret Atwood’s novel. She has been in the writing team from the beginning. People have the audacity to tell Margaret Atwood what to write! Could you imagine telling Hemingway or Dickens how to write their stories?

I don’t know if I should cry or laugh.

Celebrities and gossip is another way so called common people live someone else’s lives. Who does what with whom, where and how. And in that sense celebrities are paid by the entertainment industry and their sponsors to keep people’s minds busy so they will leave politics and sensitive economic and cultural issues alone. Live your virtual lives and leave the real life issues to us!

Well, I would love to wake up these masses to turn off the tv, stop reading gossip and Facebook but it’s not that easy. Habits like watching tv, youtube, facebook and now tik tok addiction is very difficult to break. Sometimes it takes serious intervention, and that is not my place.

Others are manipulated by ideas that have been fed to them carefully to serve some powerful people’s agenda so they feel superior to others and they feel it is their right to exploit others. Supremacists, hard core chauvinists, sociopaths need to stay away. I do not believe that I could change their ways of thinking.

I believe however that there are an increasing number of intelligent people out there who are not satisfied with what they are served up by the media and their own leaders so they are looking for ways to improve their own lives, their family’s lives, give their future children better structure than we have ever had, and want to leave a livable planet behind. Those are my people!

I would like to find you and I would like to build a community around us.

We need to be aware of our environment and see everybody and everything for who and what they are. I call it “know your friends well and know your adversaries too” I mean be open and transparent as much as you can afford to be authentic so you won’t get hurt, your friends will be able to support you better that way. Your adversaries will get to know you better as well. I am personally not bothered by that, I do not have anything to hide. But I also can see my adversaries for who they are. There are serious giveaways about how they speak, their body language as well as their words, how they act, how they show their feelings. They try to manipulate, bully and gaslight others. We need to guard ourselves early in life and need to teach our children too, because it will be part of their lives really early on.

Manipulation is everywhere, but the entertainment industry has become really sophisticated in the last one hundred years.

Chapter 5: In the past decades I often wondered why the different tv channels try to entertain people without any mental stimulation? Their aim is simply to get ratings. It has meant to get down to a lower and lower level so wider and wider audiences would watch and ratings would go up.

PBS is one exception though. They need to raise money to stay alive but they also raise people to a higher level by giving them valuable information, something to think about, learn and explore. They boost knowledge, they raise people up.

From the beginning commercial tv channels have been there for one thing only: for profit. How to get it? Cheap thrills, entertainment, later they got more sophisticated and less meaningful but the bottom line never changed. By now, after many decades our expectations got aligned by what they offer. Entertainment for their profit is just a show with big booms and bangs, blood and body parts, heroes and antiheroes good and evil, binary thinking.

We need to get out of our everyday routine, our boring school and work life. We accept that school should be the way it is, the system as it is, work, well it’s a job, so after all the boring hard work and school we deserve entertainment. Youtube and Tik Tok is the modern continuance of this trend. By now we are so conditioned and entitled to rate and like, that real valuable content can go down the drain easily because it is not that comprehensible and popular anymore. Who wants to think after work? News beg for our attention. Naturally they represent their benefactors, their donors, so they want to manipulate our opinions. The customer knows best, the most popular wins the profits, you vote with your ratings. But how do you know? How do they know? Or do they just vote from ignorance? Can you become more aware and educate yourself and break the manipulation cycle? I wonder and I am worried.

I was told to follow trends and popular issues when I pick topics for my podcast. But that is not the reason I started to do this! I have something to tell. I believe that you need to hear some things in an organized manner. and if you share some of the things that you want me to talk about sooner rather than later, I will listen. But I will not just speak about trendy issues. I will not gossip and I will not talk about politics. Who is the villain of today? And who is the Cinderella of the celebrities? I do not care.

Chapter 6: Because everything needs to be either right or wrong. True or false, good or bad, nice or ugly. There is no in between anymore. On or off, zero or one, everything has to be binary, no fifty shades of gray. The lawyer is asking at court: did you or didn’t you say this and that? Yes or no? And you hesitate, and he yells at you yes, or no? And you just want to yell back: the coin can fall on head or tails but sometimes it falls on the edge! Sometimes there is no simple yes or no answer.

Binary thinking is a shortcut of our age. We need to win, otherwise we think we lose.

I canceled a contract recently and I explained to the freelancer my reasons. She felt the need to over explain her side and shift the blame, although there was no blame at the first place. It was a contract that was not continued. But blame needed to be laid nevertheless because otherwise she would have felt defeated. She definitely needs to learn about no-lose resolutions.

I used to manage a food service unit with 20 employees. It could be quite challenging to give feedback if we just wait until issues accumulate and work performance suffers and disciplinary actions need to be taken. Feedback needs to be given right on the spot when an issue comes up stating the facts. When you tell the person responsible to put the shipment away, you only need to state the facts and wait for their response. “The frozen goods stayed out at room temperature for example, for over two hours this morning.” you can say. His reason might be valid or may be just an excuse. So you listen, then you proceed accordingly but never start with an accusation.

Some employers wait until the annual review to dump everything on the employee all at once when people are on the fence anyway, constructive criticism is hard to be given and hard to receive especially if it is not attached to a direct situation. Employees don’t even know what to expect if they don’t get frequent feedback. So no wonder if they get upset.

People get offended really quickly and they get defensive even faster. At the same time they will offend others easily without even realizing it. I bet you can give many examples for that.

This binary thinking however is not inherent to humanity. It came with culture. Can you help us to find the root to it?

Chapter 7: Would you like to share some of your thoughts about the questions I raised in this episode?

So the first question was what you think about my ideas about the Humanly Genius Academy based on your experiences of your education.

The second question was knowing about how our ancestors survived 50,000 years ago knowing that they were just about the same as we are right now, how does that make you feel about yourself, about the root of your own humanity.

And the last question just came up. What do you think about our binary thinking? What is the root of that? Why do we have to think about only two ways, right or wrong, bad or good? Where did it come from? How we can break this cycle.

Join our Let Your Genius Emerge discussion group on Facebook! Give us some ideas!

Chapter 8:

If you’d like to sponsor us, you can do so on Patreon Let Your Genius Emerge.

I will post some of the sources about our ancestors on HumanlyGenius.com

We will release a new episode every Tuesday by 9 am Eastern Standard Time, that is 3 PM Central European Standard Time.

In our next episode I will honor a request and talk about depression. We are two years into the pandemic, and either you are struggling with working from home or working outside of your home, serving or in health care, you might feel overwhelmed, specially when you have children and loved one who need to be cared for, homeschooled from time to time, got the virus and needed care. Depression is still something we feel we can’t talk about. It is silently taking our soul. I would like to give you a different perspective on it as well as how to handle it short of getting a prescription from your psychiatrist.

If you are interested in any of the subjects, especially the assertive non-violent communication and ESL coaching, send me a message on HumanlyGenius.com or letyourgeniusemerge@gmail.com

Don’t forget, the next episode is next Tuesday! And Don’t forget: Think, explore, create, communicate! Be yourself and try to be the best you can Goodbye for now.

Let Your Genius Emerge

The Roots of Our Human Nature

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