HUMAN BAIT
Have you ever seen one of those artificial fish baits? They catch fish by using a fake one. Pretty common thing fishermen use but I am not into fishing that much so it is not something I see everyday. They also use fake ducks for duck hunting. Peacocks cannot tell the difference between a real female peacock and a fake one either. I even heard that male peacocks try to fuck that thing even if they shred it into pieces until only a wooden stick remains in place. Oh god, how dumb these animals are? It is a blessing we don't get fooled by cheap tricks like these thanks to our superior intelligence, right?
What is the biggest mastery of mankind? Language? Inventiveness? Superior survival skills? If you ask me, our biggest mastery is fake gratification. We mastered the art of getting baited by our own traps. We do lots of things that serves no purpose to our survival. Fish gets baited because bait plays into its primal instincts of getting food. Duck gets baited because its little duck brain is programmed into fucking any object that looks like a female duck. But when humans get baited, they know what they are getting into. It's like we cheated the evolution.
All the entertainment we have plays into our primal instincts. You are a ruthless medieval lord, a space captain, a dragonborn who saves the world from evil creatures, a headshot master on call of duty, a hero, a god, a plumber on mushrooms trying to save a princess from a fire breathing turtle, a schizo circle man swallowing white pills and avoiding ghosts. All in the magical world of computers. Maybe you are not that into video games but don't lie to me, you jerk off the wildest shit you can find on the internet. You are wasting your time watching minute long videos for momentary happiness. Or maybe you are a social media larper. Lets say you are beyond all these senseless entertainment and spend most of your time reading Wikipedia articles. Well fine, you are an intellectual. But you do all that to feel superior in your mind. Aimless, purposeless learning can be quite addictive and you can even convince yourself you are not wasting your time. Knowing the average penis size of blue whales can be a good conversation starter (probably not) but learning shit like that serves no purpose unless you are biologist.
Shiny world of entertainment is designed purposefully to be addictive. You are getting fooled into spending your time, your money and even ability to think. Just like a fish biting into a plastic bait. Shit reached to a point that porn is more appealing than getting laid, consuming mass produced garbage dumped by content farms of the internet is more appealing than getting some job done, spending countless hours playing videogames is more appealing than putting any effort into improving yourself. Shit gets fancier and fancier. You can get whatever you want, whenever you want with no effort whatsoever. Artificial gratification appeals people more than real life gratification. Do I sound like a boomer? I am not gonna act like I don't get fooled by these cheap tricks of stealing attention. I do waste quite a lot of time surfing the web. I am guilty as much as others.
There is another wild thing outside of hollow entertainment of the internet era. If you pull your eyes off your screen for a while and take a look at the real world for a moment and what we are doing everyday you will realize how different it is from our nature. Everything we do ties to our primitive instincts but none of the things we do looks like a natural behavior of an organism with one purpose. You don't see animals wasting energy for sake of wasting energy but we do. You are compelled to building a career, tempted to get rich, obsessed with success and accomplishment, obsessed with your shape and beauty, obsessed with your social status. So much so that, if you feel like you are not good at any of these you feel depressed, suicidal even. Your brain tricks you into thinking that only way of survival is money and only way of getting laid is fancy cars and a fat wallet.
Just like some other mammals, you are climbing your way up to a higher place in the hierarchy to increase your chance of survival and breeding. Your worth is not measured by your survival capabilities in wilderness anymore. It doesn't matter you can use a spear and hunt down a huge buffalo. Survival and breeding on humans are tied to combination of wealth, social skills, wisdom and intelligence and some stuff remains from the stone age like your height and physical abilities.
Your brain uses prize and punishment method to keep your body operable at the most optimum way for survival. It releases dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphin when you do something positive for protection and procreation of your genes. It releases adrenaline to keep you sharp in a life and death situation. But none of the things we do is related to survival. We simply abuse these mechanics to avoid pain and obtain happiness. We trick our minds to release these chemicals. Life and death situation used to mean coming across a predator, now it means failing at school or losing your job.
Where am I trying to get with this you might ask. I am not one of those redpilled "alpha males" preaching you the way of life. I am trying to say, maybe life itself is a huge bait we created with our own hands and we are biting into it. Maybe we are fooling ourselves into giving too much meaning to trivial things in life. So much so that we are beating ourselves up for things that are not necessary for survival. Maybe life itself lost its ties with nature for us. Maybe there is no difference between fake gratification comes from internet media and real life gratification comes from ego masturbation.