thehyperplane

[thehyperplane]

Humans love problems

You’re here, reading this article, and I wrote this article on a cool rainy Sunday morning, perfect for a picnic. Why did we do that? I am writing this article because I just had an existential crisis and a career crisis and a financial crisis. You’re here probably because you got bored or you had one of your own crisis, that can only be resolved by reading random stuff. It can be anything, we’re here for a reason, however silly/smart it may be. We’re here to solve a problem, in my case the crises.

Why do we do anything. I mean, as humans, as a species, why do we do what we do? We could have lived our lives in caves, hunting and gathering whatever we can, living off whatever we had, but still we chose to settle down, grow our own food, create large communities, villages, towns, cities, countries. We are the only species which chose to go for agriculture, invent languages, write scriptures, create stories, create stories of creation, invent currency, manage accounts, run organizations, wage wars, discover America (whatever that means), discover science, discover inner self and so on. Why did we do all that?

Well, as it so happens, our brain’s frontal cortex is the culprit here. Humans were the first species to discover fire, which lead to us eating boiled soft food. This created an energy surplus and that energy went straight to our brain. One thing lead to another and now here we are, our brain is better (??) than every other species’. The frontal cortex (which existed even before discovery of fire, but now was even better) is the part of our brain which does the work of understanding language, creating sequences for multi-step tasks, working memory (Kinda like RAM), reasoning, judgement, organizing, planning, forming a personality, controlling social behavior and bunch of other stuff. This is the part of the brain that gets triggered when you see a problem, like when you get bored and feel like you should do something about it, or when you feel like being rich and realize you gotta do something about it, or when you see a hot guy/gal and can't find courage to approach them and feel like you should do something about it. And when it happens that the problem you’re facing is also the problem most/many other humans are facing and your brain decides to solve that, and it also knows how to scale the solution to possibly millions (if not billions) of other humans, we as a society and as a species make progress. This is the reason why we are where we are. I mean literally, me writing this article in a small room, somewhere in the middle of nowhere and you reading it wherever you are (on/near earth). 

We have made most of this progress because we’re an aware species, we keep looking for problems and their solutions. As individuals, it may not be as apparent, but as a species we are far from where we started. But most of what we have achieved was achieved within last few hundred years. True, we’re problem solvers right from the time when evolution upgraded a bacteria into a conscious organism, but from then till the the scientific revolution in 1543, our pace was very very (if not very very very) slow. That’s when humans went on a problem solving spree and solved one problem after other. What inspired humans is a whole different story in itself, but look at it this way: Orville and Wilbur created their first designs of gliders in early 1900s and we sent first rocket to space in 1950 and first human in 1961.

We look at problems every day and take a decision to solve them everyday. It happens so unconsciously that we don’t even realize, most of what we do is hinged at a problem we strive to solve. Your job, your work at your job, studies, workout, reading, writing, scrolling through social media/blogs, drinking water, eating food, not eating food, even brushing your teeth, everything you do, is because you have a problem that each of these activities solve. Most problems today have existing solutions which we can apply directly. It’s the problems for which solutions don’t yet exist, that require high level cognitive and thinking skills. 

Some people find a problem and see true meaning of their life in solving that problem, sometimes they succeed sometimes they fail. If they succeed and find a way to scale the solution, then they reach heights, make name, fame, money and what not. And if they fail, they pick other problems to solve, these are usually referred to as disrupters or change makers. And some (well, most of us) people can’t find such defining problems in life, and our brain, as filthy as it is, goes on to create problems out of thin air. Our brain has evolved to look for problems and solutions at all times and when it fails to recognize a problem worthy of its time, it sees that as a problem and urges us to work on that. Humans are probably the only species with a problem of not having a problem to solve. Maybe this is because of the belief that we all carry with us that we need to make impact, or maybe its merely because of our nature as a species that we constantly seek meaning in life, but problems and finding their solutions remain the core objective of our species. 

Concluding: Humans love problems.

Endnotes: This is my first blog/article/online post/anything I’ve ever written. I apologize if there are any factual mistakes or if there are any grammatical errors. My writing goes here and there, it happens every time I start writing, I can’t stop that. Do excuse me for that.

And Thanks for reading. :)

Sources:

https://www.healthline.com/health/frontal-lobe#function

Some concepts from Homo Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-has-human-brain-evolved/

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/ufhatch/pages/03-sci-rev/sci-rev-teaching/03sr-definition-concept.htm

https://www.space.com/39251-on-this-day-in-space.html

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-man-in-space

Photo by Rob Schreckhise on Unsplash