#19 Evolutionary Psychology

Sometimes you hear a guy say, with a certain contrarian alacrity, that he "doesn't like people." That guy may be earnest, he may even be thoughtful, but he is completely full of sh*t. People are the one thing we all really like. People, and the love that they offer, motivate almost every human behavior.

Admittedly it's an instinct wrought with conceptual conflict. As intelligent minds we know none of it, not just human connection but life itself, matters that much. Eventually a comet or meteor or whatever will blow earth and all traces of humanity large and small into dust and smithereens, and the rest will be silence, forever. It'll just be God and grainy Mickey Mouse cartoons, zipping through dark matter at 186,000 miles a sec.

Yet evolution’s inertia presses us on. The ancestral DNA embedded in our chromosomes embedded in our brain cells make us fight to find love and love our hearts out when we find it and despair when we inevitably lose it. Life is, foundationally, pretty simple that way. We work hard, we chase girls and hope for the best.

But sometimes we fail. Sometimes for all our endeavors no one likes us back or, at least, no girls like us, or at least no girls we like like us. Not in THAT way. It happens to us now and it happened to our socially primitive forebears eons ago. The forces of sexual selection are ruthless. But our DNA accounts for this too. Our DNA is wily.

Our DNA's sexual disaster management plan is this: use our elegant and powerful brains to single out and analyze a temporary and totally random fluctuation in our external environment, either a socio-economic aberration or a geo-political quiddity or unforeseeable pop cultural contingency - something, anything, that can be reasonably comprehended, at least from a certain perspective, as a real phenomenon - that could account for why a creature so dashing, so humorous, so virile, so lovely as ourselves, can't get a girl. We rationalize.

It's an amazing cognitive process. The more severe the sexual failure the more creative and trenchant our analysis becomes; we'll stress test the outer limits of logic, countermand foundational rules of social behavior, be rude, be silly, be jejune, hide behind arcane vocabulary. The range of machinations will be as wide as the corn-fed backsides that balding, soft-breasted middle-aged men love to ridicule.

And this makes us feel better. It ameliorates our experience of negative affect. We don't give up. We cope. We struggle on. And our DNA lives to see another day and another chance to hustle its way into the embrace of a winsome lady.