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Random neuron firing, lame philosophy, literary pontificating, movies, sex, clothes & other femme stuff

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

The hunter-gatherers did it

Generally I'm suspicious of Darwinian adaptationist accounts of the psychological dispositions of today's middle-class American (the sorta stuff that sluices lucre into Steven Pinker's coffers), but if you have to listen to them I kinda like this NYT letter writer (you may'fta register) who derives our drive to shop from our hunter-gatherer days:
If you went out and found a cache of ripe berries or roots, you were happy! But the happiness did not last long; soon you had to go out and get more food, wood and so on to feed your family and yourself.

Hence, the need for repeated shopping; the pleasure does not last even as the products ultimately do.
It's kinda like how back on the African savannahs "we" benefited from "our" drive to consume fats and carbs 'cause "we" ever-active hunter-gatherers burned calories like power plants, but today on the American sofas though we now burn them like wet safety matches some reactionary hunter-gatherer genes refuse to get with the program and keep making us wanna pop Lindt/Lindor chocolate truffles like sunflower seeds.

Btw. in case you somehow missed out on learning how to taste chocolate, the Lindt site explains the procedure in pornographic detail. If you're modest and easily aroused you might want to hold off on clicking there till you have a private moment.
Posted by: Mika / 12/10/2003 03:38:00 PM permalink  · 0 comments
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