A lot of people ask me how I write blog posts—where I get my ideas from. They’re often surprised when I give them a precise, step-by-step answer. Here’s my patented ® formula for writing Everything Is Bullshit content:
I look at a story we tell ourselves. Maybe it’s the pursuit of happiness or the meaning of life. Maybe it’s our desire to change people’s minds or make the world a better place. Maybe it’s the idea that we don’t care what others think.
I ask myself if the story makes any evolutionary sense.
If the answer is no, I think about what might be going on beneath the surface—something that would make evolutionary sense.
I call the story we tell ourselves “bullshit.”
I write about what’s likely going on beneath the surface.
I link to a lot of technical papers in evolutionary psychology that nobody clicks on.
As I sit at my desk this minute, my wrist is doing everything that I want my wrist to do. My wrist is healthy. When a friend raises a thoughtful point with regard to something I’ve posted, I recognize the good will that flows through his words. I recognize that my friend is my ally, and this recognition shows that in this situation, my psyche and my morality are working adaptively because they are aligned with my interests. By contrast, when I arrived at Pacific Union College (PUC) in the summer of 1977, and I was introduced to do my future classmates in the PUC pool, I started splashing them as aggressively as possible. My psyche and moral system was not working in a healthy manner at that moment because I was acting against my evolutionary interests (life in the middle of the herd is usually the healthiest way to live while living outside the herd is the most dangerous). An evolutionary understanding of morality recognize that we have impulses about right and wrong and you want them to function in your long-term best interest, which usually means getting along with the people most important to you such as family. When you meet someone who doesn’t get along with others, your central nervous system should alert you that this person is dangerous to your well-being.
