Procrustes and Eden 1

Lists

In an effort to organize my life and make some changes for the better, I just sat down with a pen and paper and made some lists. The first list was of my priorities, and the second was a list of my distractions. After thinking about those two lists I made a third list of comments and observations about the first two, and the last items on that third list were "Procrustes" and "Eden." I want to write about those. It will take at least 2 entries. Here is the first.

Procrustes

My list of priorities broke down into 5 major categories. In no particular order they were: Making a living, relationships, health, enjoyment, and education. Each had several subpoints, for example health broke down to include sleep, diet, and exercise. Looking at my list of priorities reminded me of my favorite word: procrustean.

Procrustes was a bandit in Greek mythology who invited travelers into his roadside house, offering to let them use a bed that he claimed would precisely accommodate anyone regardless of their size. His invitation didn't mention that Procrustes guaranteed the bed's perfect fit by mutilating his guests - chopping off legs if they were too long, or stretching his short visitors on the rack. In modern English, "procrustean" is an adjective defined here as "producing or designed to produce strict conformity by ruthless or arbitrary means."

For the overwhelming majority of human history, defining one's priorities like I did (making a living, relationships, health, education, exercise) would have been preposterous, because they all were so interwoven that separating them would be silly. People made a living by doing whatever their parents did, usually hunting and gathering, in recent history farming, and very recently by specialized trades. They worked with the small tribe of family and friends that they spend their entire lives with, and they got their exercise from the work they did to put food in their bellies. Almost everything they learned was from watching and listening to elders and observing the world around them as they lived. Maybe if they were lucky they had some free time to sing songs or carve some wood, which was probably great fun they wished they could have more often.

Our world is bizarre compared to that. We can choose from almost unlimited ways to make a living. We can spend our lives with anyone we want (who will agree to it) and not necessarily anywhere near the family and friends we grew up with. Most of our career options won't involve much physical labor, so we'll have to get exercise another way if we want to stay in good health. An astonishing diversity of food is widely available for relatively little cost. The education that is emphasized is highly formalized, the education that is most valuable is ridiculed, and entertainment is at our fingertips any time and fully customizable to our every whim.

My point making this contrast isn't to romanticize and glorify my imagined version of primitive life, though I am tempted to do so. I know enough to realize that the vast majority of human existence is a violent, cruel and painful story and I wouldn't want to give up my place for that. Nor is my (main) intent to criticize our world, though I certainly tend to do that as well. And it would also be terrible to overlook that fact that most of the people alive today are struggling just to survive, and that the silly problems I'm writing about are nothing compared to their struggle.

My point is that we were built for the primitive world, not the First World, and that's why it is so easy to lose track of our priorities. In the primitive world, all of those priorities were mashed together in a daily struggle for survival, so it wasn't important for evolution to weave into our minds a specialty to prioritize our lives the way I did with that list. In modern times we've made so much progress in so many real ways that daily survival isn't a struggle, but an inadvertent cost of that progress is that we're confronted with problems we aren't good at solving. Those problems aren't as bad as Procrustes cutting off my feet, but I still feel like I'm being forced to fit where I don't quite belong.