Have you ever found yourself anxious, dissatisfied, and tired of waking up in that hotbed of drudgery and tedium you’ve affectionately come to refer to as your life? It is a common morning ritual for our species, staring at the ceiling and wondering why existence feels so inherently heavy. We drag ourselves out of bed, fueled by vague obligations, stepping into a world that demands a relentless performance of sanity.
You might be convinced that everyone else has their ducks in a row, while you simply lurch from disaster to disaster. You might feel like some rickety tandem Victorian velocipede caught in a perpetual cycle: feeling good for a fleeting moment, feeling medium, and then returning to feeling like absolute crap again. You find yourself perpetually waiting for that elusive day when you will actually remain in a good mood for more than five minutes.
Well, there is a very good reason for this existential exhaustion, and it begins, as we all did, with biology. Nature essentially uses two methods for making babies on this planet: “boink” and “no boink”. Asexual reproduction, the “no boink” method, is straightforwardly used by bacteria, plants, and fungi, involving an organism merely copying its genetic material for the next generation.
On the other hand, sexual reproduction—the “boink” method—involves a male and a female doing the nasty and combining their DNA fifty-fifty to produce offspring. This is the very process that shaped us as humans. Over immense stretches of time, species change due to selection and mutation. Selection dictates that organisms better suited to their environment survive and reproduce, often favoring bizarre mating displays like a male bowerbird decorating a bachelor pad for months just to attract ladies.
Then there is mutation, which refers to the glitches in the DNA of offspring caused by copying errors or even cosmic rays. Sometimes these mutations are passed down, and if they happen to be beneficial for survival, they become a characteristic feature of the entire species. Through circumstances we still largely do not understand, human beings developed relatively large brains and managed to outsmart or avoid every other species on the planet.
It is, essentially, good old survival of the shittest. While we pride ourselves on being fantastically clever, very little has actually changed in terms of our biological hardware between prehistoric humans and modern humans, simply because evolution takes ages. We still carry the exact same archaic operating system in a wildly modern world.
Of course, modern humans are undeniably sneaky; we have taken those old evolutionary urges and found clever ways to still enjoy them without the intended consequences. We channeled aggressive combat into competitive martial arts, and turned a constant obsession with reproduction into an act you can do thousands of times across your lifespan without ever actually making offspring.
But evolution is not a smart or conscious process, and many things are shockingly poorly designed. For example, a narrow pelvis makes childbirth a thoroughly unenjoyable experience for women everywhere. Or consider the act of standing upright, which kindly granted us a better line of sight and the ability to grab things, but gave us sciatica and hemorrhoids in return.
Alongside the physical flaws, we have inherited the mental traits evolution kindly gave to our ancestors. These include incredible things like creativity, curiosity, and speech, but also a low anxiety threshold, a bit of a tendency for pessimism, and a token inability to keep right on the London Underground escalators. We are, undeniably, a contradictory mix of animal and mad God.
Yet, there is one particular evolutionary bad boy that is so fundamental to the human condition we barely even notice it is there, and its name is misery. The harsh truth is that we are not designed for sustained happiness or optimism. Natural selection had absolutely very little interest in our mental welfare; survival was the only key.
As a result, most of us possess a genetic hedonic setpoint that seems largely out of our control. Something good might happen, and you will feel good for a while; something bad might happen, and you will feel bad for a while. But eventually, inevitably, you will probably return to your baseline. For a lucky few, this setpoint is rather high, but for the rest of us, it is painfully mediocre.
This baseline ignores all the other tragic pitfalls of Brain 1.0, including age-related dementia, self-loathing, a tendency towards addiction, and overwhelmingly low boredom thresholds. Genetically speaking, these nasties have haunted us for millennia, forming what we have lovingly come to know as the human condition. For many, this phrase is just a polite shorthand for the bleak realization that we are miserable, it is natural, and we just need to have a cup of tea and get on with it.
But what if we could send these evolutionary dishes back to the kitchen?. For centuries, we have been clumsy genetic engineers, breeding dog species for specific traits, using what is essentially a crude “hammer” method that unfortunately also gave them terrible inherited traits like hip dysplasia and epilepsy.
Today, however, we are potentially holding a scalpel. This method, called CRISPR, works by hijacking a bacterial trick to snip out targeted sections of DNA in organisms. Inside our cells, long strings of DNA composed of four bases make up our genes, which act as genetic verbs telling the body’s proteins what to do. Considering thousands of diseases are caused by a mistake of just one genetic letter, we might not need too much alteration to fix the nasties latent in our DNA.
Naturally, playing God warrants immense caution. Genetic engineering is incredibly complicated, and there is certainly no single “cleverness gene” or a simple switchboard for making us happy on or sad off. Genetics is an interconnected tapestry where some traits are caused by thousands of genes, and making small alterations could unleash horrific consequences.
But if we ever manage to speak fluent genetics without shepherding in the apocalypse, we could potentially scout out the roots of self-hate, anxiety, and the genetic foundations of misery itself. Mental well-being is the most important factor in being alive; without it, even living in a solid-gold mansion and sleeping on a bed of Fabergé eggs means you are still just miserable.
The ultimate goal wouldn’t be to erase our humanity, but to overthrow our evolutionary curses. We might raise our baseline happiness default without compromising our core personality. While some pain is completely necessary—like grieving a lost loved one or feeling a nagging sense of wasted time when gaming all day—there are simply no beneficial aspects to lifelong, involuntary depression.
If tomorrow’s genetic explorers succeed, the future of biology will be stranger than we can imagine. We might isolate the molecular structure of bliss and proliferate it, or isolate the structure of misery and kill it completely. We may venture into strange new floors of the human experience, achieving degrees of euphoria light-years beyond anything possible today, leaving the psycho-chemical dark ages behind forever.
Because we are a uniquely batshit species, we have already begun to force the demons of nature into retreat. Due to our ingenuity and compassion, we have taken lethal afflictions like smallpox and assigned them the most lovely word in the English language: “was”. We collectively roundhouse kicked it into the past tense.
If everything goes well as we mature as a species, that beautiful word will steadily propagate throughout our encyclopedias. Perhaps, centuries from today, some future child will stumble upon a future incarnation of Wikipedia and read about our present afflictions couched relentlessly in the wonderful past tense. They will read that “misery was an involuntary state of distress common to humans of all eras… and its eradication marked the beginning of the banishment of the existential horrors from the human condition.”