I find it insane how serious we take things as human beings sometimes.

I often will see people out in the world who are so easily upset or offended over the views/opinions of another and as well I see those who get so locked up in their own views and opinions of themselves that I don’t believe they realize what they are emotional or upset at.

They are getting mad at a walking contradiction, a human being….

Let me explain.

As a human being we have these bodies that are naturally hard-wired to survive, thrive and reproduce. There are these drives within us that keep us moving forward every day that we need to satisfy or else overtime they begin to take hold and dominate our bodies and our minds.

The need to eat and nourish the body, the need to sleep and recover the body, the need for competition and togetherness with others, the need for sex and reproduction, the need to be physical and active and the need to be mental and intellectually creative.

Stop eating for longer then your body is normally used to and your stomach sends signals to the brain which will cause you to lose focus, become irritable, experience light-headedness and will even cause physical reactions like gurgling or rumbling in the gut. Skip a few hours of sleep or even a whole night and you can experience a depressed mood, difficulty learning new concepts, forgetfulness, irritability and fatigue. Get trapped on a deserted island or be thrown in solitary confinement and overtime you will literally lose your mind.

These needs of the body can ‘dominate’ and control us as human beings by dictating our actions and behaviours OR we can learn to control and ‘conquer’ these instinctual drives but, nevertheless, they are a need that at one point needs to be addressed and satisfied.

I call these needs: Animalistic Instincts

Animalistic Instincts are the physical & instinctive characteristics of animals that are hard-wired within our bodies as humans that cause us to have fixed behavior patterns in response to certain stimuli.

For example, if you smell a certain food and immediately get hungry and transfixed on food you are dominated by that instinctual drive. Or let’s say you see an attractive person and lose focus on the task at hand you are dominated by that instinctual drive.

By giving in and allowing an instinctual drive to dominate over you, you are no less animal then a shark on the hunt after the scent of blood or a male baboon transfixed by the swelling backside of a female while in estrous.

Look at any commercial or advertisement, any product or service, any business or establishment.

Almost ALL are connected to these instinctual drives in some way or another. Either to satisfy it or to conquer it (and sometimes even to allow it to temporarily or continually dominate us).

So what is it that makes us human?
What separates & makes us different from the animals and our animalistic instincts?

The only difference between us as human beings and animals is the ability to perceive time. [I won’t dive deep into this here but check out Sex, Time, & Power by Lenoard Shalin if you are interested in learning more on this subject] Knowing and understanding the concept of time allowed us to post-pone rewards that our instinctual drives satisfy. This is called Delayed Gratification that most (if not all) animals can’t & don’t do.

Delay of gratification, is the act of resisting an impulse to take an immediately available reward in the hope of obtaining a more-valued reward in the future. The ability to delay gratification is essential to self-regulation, or self-control.

Delayed gratification allows us to have intellectual desires that we want to accomplish and achieve that stem beyond these animalistic instincts, this is what makes us human! It’s what allowed agriculture and civilization to grow and occur which eventually lead to the ability for you to be reading words on a screen and being able to understand those words you are reading. EVERYTHING. Literally everything you know about life is because of delayed gratification or else we would still be living as hunter and gatherers.

Now I know this might sound bad to say but, most people are animals…..

Many people I meet in life have intellectual desires but are so dominated by their animalistic instincts that they are predictable like an animal and fail to accomplish them. Their regular patterns of satisfying their instincts allows them to be tracked and predicted. They sacrifice their intellectual desires in order to regularly satisfy their instincts which I believe causes them to be dominated by them.

Maybe they aren’t dominated by ALL of their animalistic instincts but usually a couple of them have a severe hold on most people. So much so that they are willing to justify ridiculous notions in life which make them contradict their own morals/values and their intellectual desires or they go out of their way in life in order to satisfy these instinctual drives.

And honestly, it’s not a bad thing. Self-regulation and self-control is an extremely hard thing to manage across all areas of life especially when these drives have such a hold over our bodies and minds.

It’s 100% understandable to me that we as humans need to give into these animalistic drives to optimize our bodies and brains or else over-time they will take hold and cause us to be unnecessarily more ‘animal’ then we need to be. Whether this is accomplished by conquering and satisfying them at our own will by our own choosing or possibly even allowing them to dominate us in the heat of the moment.

I personally find it hard to be concerned about the opinions and views of another human being enough that it would overtly control and dominate my emotional and intellectual state. I mean, we are part animal.

To me it’s understandable to contradict our intellectual desires at times in order to conquer and satisfy our animalistic instincts. I mean, these instincts are a major factor of our lives and just like preventative maintenance on a vehicle or piece of machinery I believe our bodies and minds need preventative maintenance especially in this modern day world where we’ve taken ourselves so far away from our natural lives.

I regularly question what life would be like for us as humans if we didn’t have these instinctual drives within us. If all we had were intellectual desires and we had no instinctual drives what would we be?

So I believe what makes us human, is that we are part animal….

I think if more people understood this and avoided denying this fact, if more people understood that within themselves (and others) there are these instinctual drives that are very animal in nature that we have to satisfy, I believe more people would understand why themselves and others carry out most of our actions and behaviors.

I mean, you wouldn’t get mad at an animal for doing what it naturally does, so why get mad at a human being that on top of having these natural drives, has to cope with the ability to perceive time and make decisions that very regularly contradict each other.

I think a big part of what makes us human is this contradiction between our intellectual desires and our animalistic instincts….