To be or not to be… a caveman?

Am I a pampered-up cavewoman?

I just simply can’t imagine having to learn what fire is, having to kill wild animals to cook on a spit, and have only rocks for tools…

The funny truth is that I do all these things all the time. My 5-year-old self, picking up sparks from a bonfire off the ground because they were “pretty” and then learning they shouldn’t be picked up when I burnt my hand, teaching baby Jasmine what fire was. When we have a family barbeque, the food we eat is essentially cooked on a flashier spit, that’s all a barbeque is, and the tools we use, from cranes to knives and forks, essentially come from different ores in the rocks we once craved into sharp objects for everyday use.

Ergo, I must be a cavewoman. Just a slightly freshened up one, who wears baggy tracksuit bottoms and comfy tops as a fashion statement of comfort.

This being said, looking in the mirror first thing in the morning, with my unbrushed bed hair, puffy, dark eyes, and the imprint of my pillow creases on my cheek, I do look rather more like a cavewoman than I would like to admit. I also would be embarrassed to admit how, in the winter season, my rarely shaven legs start to get hairy enough to seem pretty ape-like.

“we seem now to be at the point where we are competing with each other to the extreme.”

You might ask, what on earth has spurred on this train of thought. Well, the truth is I have been slowly but surely plodding my way through the novel ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Noah Harari. I have to say it is definitely worth a read: even though I’m only about a fifth of the way through the 462-page marathon, I have been fascinated by what I’ve read. The novel describes the competitive relationship between our ancestors, the Sapiens, and Neanderthals, and how while the two species were similar physically, Sapiens developed much greater cognitive ability; where a Neanderthal could easily fight off an enemy, Sapiens could outsmart a number of enemies at once. It reached the point where Sapiens started developing beyond the extent of simply surviving and actually starting living, by working to improve their lives as well as survive.

So, it shows that our society has been so successful because of its ability to compete, and to fight and push harder to survive than other species, but we seem now to be at the point where we are competing with each other to the extreme.

You’ll find you compete with your sibling to have the last word in an argument, or the last hit in a sibling squabble, or you’ll find that you compete with your dad to have the coolest dance moves and jokes – word of advice, don’t even try to compete with a dad joke, the sheer lack of actual humour they have makes it very hard to compete with such genius. You may compete with a fellow student or college as you try to get a certain role – school rep, house captain, head of cock soc (cocktail society – I got you there, didn’t I?), or the new head of a certain department. You may find you compete with a mate to try and win the attention of a boy or girl you think is attractive – and we all know this isn’t just a case of flashing your tailfeathers and doing a dance to win the fit bird.

But, of course, this competitiveness comes at a cost.

We are now faced with the dilemma of our psyche being so complex, and our desire to compete so great, that there is an increasing number of people struggling with mental health problems. According to the latest statistic, updated in 2020 on mind.org.uk, 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year in England, and where the increase in severe mental health problems was 9% from 1993 to 2014, the percentage of people experiencing self-harm more than doubled in the years 2000-2014, showing that suicidal thoughts and self-harm is rapidly increasing, more so than the number of people experiencing mental health problems overall.

We end up in a position where we have our animalistic instincts mixed in with our psyche, with the ‘fight or flight’ complex working alongside the ‘survival of the fittest’ mindset, leaving us on edge, stressed and emotional. I don’t quite mean that we have some caveman/woman alter ego – although the dry-throated, raspy voiced grunts we let out, as we plod along as if walking on two legs was a new phenomenon, when we’re hungover is rather like our ancestors Mr. and Mrs. Sapien. I mean more that our inbuilt animalistic instincts are a source for our stress and ceaseless drive to compete, which can make us feel more and more uncertain in the society we live in.

Therefore, we compete and react like primitive homosapiens, but we think like humans. We can’t blame the Sapiens, because this all really is a blessing in disguise, for without those nose-picking, butt scratching roots, we wouldn’t have many of the things we have today. We wouldn’t have toilets, proper houses, fine dining cuisine, air travel, fashionable clothes, the list goes on.

We wouldn’t even have nice, refreshing, cold glasses of gin and tonic.

 

Jasmine Laws

Featured image courtesy of @krysamon via Unsplash.