Eric Edmeades argues stress evolved to eliminate the weakest members of social groups, using chimp hierarchies as evidence. Modern life inverts this: successful people face constant stress while the struggling don't, triggering chronic health damage and suicidal ideation in those who should thrive.
Chapters
Now, where I'm going with this is that at an instinct level, we have a ton of instincts that got us here, but here is so different than where we wrote the code to begin with. Does this make sense? And so we have to start making some changes. We have to start recognizing that some of the things that society imposes upon us today is not what we're built for. Stress. This is my big one for you today. Stress. Does stress kill? Okay, how? How? Heart attack, hypertension, cancer. I mean, it has a number of different methods of killing, Right? But why does it kill? That seems odd. I mean, we all have stress. It shouldn't kill us. Stress is designed to take out the weakest link. It is only supposed to be the weakest link of society that is under stress on a regular basis. And then they're supposed to get voted off the island so that they do not pass on their. Their bad gene combination. If you look at a troop of chimpanzees, which they are more human than you could ever imagine, I visited this troop of chimpanzees. They had a good king and a bad king. One king challenged, and he kicked the good king out. And this is real. Like, this is a real. The good king, he's the top of the chimp pyramid here. He's in charge of everything. And when people hunted, he would take the meat and share it around with the troop. But the bad king came in and kicked him out and wouldn't share meat. He would steal the meat from, and he wouldn't give it to the children and the women and wouldn't share it with his generals. And one day, another king challenged him, another would be king, challenged him, and they got into a fight. Now, in chimpanzee culture, it's not like lions. If you're the top lion and the other lion challenges you for leadership, it's fight to the death or you leave. Nobody helps you. But if you're the chimpanzee, then the generals help you because you're the king. And so this bad king, he's defending himself and he gets bit on the face, and he realizes he's in trouble, so he runs over to the generals, calling for them to help. And he runs super fast over to the generals, and he gets over to the generals and he's like, you gotta help me. And the generals grabbed him, pinned him down, bit through both of his biceps, snipped his Achilles tendons, and then killed him for an hour and a half. That's called revenge. We thought we were the only ones that could do it. But chimpanzees can too, because they're like us. The software has been written for millions of years and now we live in this society and we need to start making some changes. Chimpanzees, they, they groom each other. You see this how they pick at each other. It also releases chemicals in them that reduces their stress. And they're only allowed to groom the chimpanzees that are higher in rank than they are. So the lowest ranking chimpanzees don't get groomed. They are under constant stress because they are not good hunters and they are not good maters and they are not good defenders. And so they die prematurely before they get to breed. Stress is meant to strengthen the species. But we have reversed things. Now we where the most successful of us in our material terms are under the most stress. And that's why we have premature death. The next time you feel stress happening in your body, I want you to recognize that every minute of irrelevant stress is communicating a signal to your DNA that you don't want to be here anymore.
