Caveman Must Run!
Earn your place at the fireside.
On this late and soothing evening, as I walk my dog up a quiet country lane, I feel like I've been hit by a car. I haven't, but earlier I finished a 13 kilometre hill run with two dozen varied obstacles in the way. Why do we enjoy torturing ourselves like this?
Dogs are more sensible. They don't get up from their nap, stretch with their distinctive “naauuurrghaaar!” sound and suddenly decide to jump into ice baths with lots of other dogs, or haul themselves over big walls, or crawl under wires buzzing with high voltage electricity. So why do us silly apes seem to enjoy it so much?
-A disclaimer: Actually I don't enjoy being repeatedly shocked by something designed to hold cattle. Everything else today was great craic, but not that bit.
The event was the bi-annual Hell & Back run on the drizzly Kilruddery Estate in County Wicklow, Ireland. I've done it a bunch of times, and typically a few thousand other enthusiasts join in, at all fitness levels. Some psychopaths run fast the entire way, others go slowly and I'm somewhere in-between. You finish stinking, with bloody knees & elbows, caked in mud and absolutely exhausted.
You can see why I go back most years… but why?
We are a species torn from nature by the tyranny of a big brain, but while we enjoy cruising in air conditioned comfort, something in our hind-brain yearns to harry prey through biting bracken.
And no spreadsheet will ever feel like hunting or gathering.
So something in our unconscious is uneasy: We sit around the fireside swapping stories, metaphorically or otherwise. Maybe the fire is a big TV and maybe the stories are swapped through a glowing rectangle by the Pocket Demon, but that's what we're doing… and something inside us feels that we haven't earned it!
Which is why we must take to the hills and exhaust ourselves.
This hunter-gatherer instinct is a perfect counter to the preaching of those whose utopia looks an awful lot like some sort of green techno-communism: Benevolent overseers placating populations with universal subsidies paid for by the savants and AIs that run the place. Everything else, of course, is reduced to a declinist degrowth cottage fantasy, where communal clothes-washing by hand is our sole outlet for gossip & community. Anything so unvirtuous as a washing machine would offend the polar bears, and progress is imperialist. Can't have that now, can we.
The inner caveman roars and beats back the bracken.
The same instinct that makes so many of us don boxing gloves, chase pavements, cross the wild places and tackle each other on muddy fields… it simply couldn't cope with equity and comfort. Our caveman brains need to seek and hunt. We need to work ourselves to find the fruits of the spring and the big game of the autumn. Our explorers need to know that there are other valleys to explore. Our warriors need to know they are needed.
Do you really want the warriors kicking their heels with nothing to do? Didn't think so.
A world without work is a utopia for children. Everything glorious in our society stems from the lashing-out of ancient instincts as we struggle to earn our place at the fireside. If we can build cathedrals or launch rockets to Mars, we do so. For the rest of us, there is always the rugby pitch and the muddy hills.
Beware those who champion equity above all, and who rail against progress. They are not your friends, and would cast you out of the hunt.
And you need the hunt…
Caveman must run!
