PIGS GOING NOWHERE

For as long as anyone could remember, pigs lived the way pigs always had. They rooted in the earth for food. They wallowed in mud to stay cool. They chased each other around the pen, found mates, and napped in a pile when the day was done. None of it required thought. Evolution did the thinking by wiring pigs with sensory rewards for behavior that promoted their survival—pleasure, comfort, calm. Rooting felt good, so pigs rooted. Wallowing soothed them, so they wallowed. Eating and mating felt even better, so they made a habit of that too. A simple system, but a reliable one. The pigs survived.

Then one afternoon, by accident, a pig discovered that if it rubbed its front hooves together just so, a familiar wave ran through its body. The sensations were similar to those it got from rooting, or rolling in the mud, or stumbling across something to eat—only quicker, easier, and without effort. The pig didn’t understand why. It only knew it liked the feeling.

Soon, other pigs noticed. They tried it. They liked it too. The rooting slowed. The wallowing slowed. Even mating slowed. Why spend energy when two hooves and a little pressure deliver the same rewards?

Weeks passed. The pigs grew thinner. The mud dried around them. Some lay still, hooves pressed together, chasing a feeling nature had never meant to be free of effort. Eventually, the pigs were gone. They were not hunted, starved, or frozen. They simply found a loophole in the wiring that made them pigs.

Evolution had spent millions of years building incentives. The pigs found the reward and discarded the behavior.

Discovering Our Own Control Panel

In some ways, we have become like the pigs. Our brains are wired with the same logic: behaviors that once helped us survive come with rewards—pleasure, relief, curiosity satisfied, loneliness eased. But there is a difference. The pigs reached their shortcut accidentally. We choose ours on purpose.

Our intelligence advanced far enough that we began to examine the machinery of our own minds—and then found ways to press the buttons directly.

We learned that attention can feel like belonging, so we built platforms that hand out tiny hits of validation with every tap. We learned that novelty and fear light up the brain, so we built feeds of entertainment and outrage, always a thumb-flick away. We learned that sexual imagery can satisfy ancient instincts without intimacy, so we split the two and made it available on demand. We learned that sugar, MSG, and fat trigger the circuits that once drove us to forage, so we engineered food more pleasurable than anything in the wild. And we learned that simulated companionship can soothe a lonely mind, so we built AI bots that offer warmth whenever we ask—no friendship required. 

The results have been predictable. Americans now average nearly seven hours of screen time a day. Porn sites worldwide receive 2.5 million visits every minute. American calorie consumption has risen by nearly 100 calories per decade since the 1970s. And marriage and birth rates are in freefall. The American birth rate is now 1.6 children per woman—well below what's needed to sustain a population.

Other animals trust evolution’s incentives because they do not know they exist. We know. We measure them, refine them, market them, and improve them. When a loophole appears, we do not stumble into it—we scale it.

And these are not the only ways humans have learned to bypass the behaviors evolution meant to reward. Take writing. Evolution gave us a pleasant spark from forming thoughts into words and sharing them with others. But I didn’t write this essay. AI did. I just told it what I wanted to say. I even asked it to sound like me. Why would I take the time to write?

What’s next? Economists might say that’s easy: when shortcuts create a lower price for the same goods, why go the long way? 

But where will the shortcuts lead? We are like a child who discovers the cheat code to a video game and skips straight to the end. In the short term, the child might feel like they’ve won. But have they missed the whole point of the game?

by ChatGPT, guided by Simon Davidson
charlottesville29@gmail.com