Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Yes, we’re all lazy but don’t abuse it.

And it makes sense when you come to think of it. As we evolved the one thing, the most important thing to get hold of, was calories and then using as few of them as possible when we did get them.

This inevitably leads us to gravitate to the lifestyle to maximise this reality. Eat as much calorie dense food as possible when available, lay down fat stores when there’s an excess and avoid any calorie burning activities if possible.

Welcome to the modern lifestyle.

But it’s not just physical activity. It’s also cognitive.

The greatest use of calories is the mental gymnastics we perform throughout the day. So it’s only sensible to be as lazy in our thinking as possible and avoid any taxing processes to drain our reserves of calories. So we have our biases. Our default methods of decisionmaking requiring as little effort as possible. Things like confirmation bias, correlation and causation, stereotyping and racism. There are literially hundreds of these huristics to help us skip the thinking and make a quick and dirty decision. Which was fine when hunter gathering on the savanna. Things are a little more complicated now so maybe a little more complicated thinking is in order rather than defaulting to our earlier programming.