Are We Using Our Adaptability Wrong?

Our greatest strength can easily also be our undoing.

Sometimes your thoughts are all in a bundle and it’s really hard to tease them apart.

So I have been thinking a lot about the concept of softness. There are two different types of softness, and it seems to me that we all long for one of them, but end up landing in the other, much to our own detriment. They are linked to each other, they look sort of similar - sisters, almost - but each with a very different core.

So one softness is the kind that is synonymous with gentleness. The kind that lets you accept and calm a child’s temper tantrum by holding space for their feelings. The kind that lets you remain relaxed and open when someone is trying to provoke you into anger. There is a profound strength at the core of this sort of softness. Being gentle in a relentless world requires the willingness to receive injury and repair yourself over and over and over again.

The other sort of softness is the kind that makes you unironically say things like ‘oh my GOD, I would literally DIE without my daily morning latte. I would just DIE.’ There is a weakness at the core of this other type of softness - that mushy feeling that indicates spots of rot on an otherwise firm piece of fruit. It’s a sort of social decay.

As times have changed, obviously our lives have changed as well. I am very fond of this great letter written by composer Robert Schumann to his wife Clara, lamenting the eternal softening of the times:

What would I not do for love of you, my own Clara! The knights of old were better off; they could go through fire or slay dragons to win their ladies, but we of today have to content ourselves with more prosaic methods, such as smoking fewer cigars, and the like. After all, though, we can love, knights or no knights; and so, as ever, only the times change, not men’s hearts.

It is a very handsome love letter, of the sort you are unlikely to encounter today. And it makes me think Robert felt as I feel - in the beforetimes we were tougher, and this toughness made us capable of more formidable things. Today we carry the same longings, but not the same grit.

But the thing I really wonder about is his last line. Is it really only the times that change, and not men’s hearts? Is it possible to feel the same on the inside as someone who has gone through much more hardship than you? As someone who has gone through none at all?

Whenever I mention something like this in conversation with my friends, I will get accused of glorifying an ugly past that caused much harm to people we have now forgotten. And I don’t deny that side of it. There were definitely struggles people faced in the past that didn’t bring with them anything but unnecessary suffering. Like lack of accommodation for disabled or neurodivergent people. Like the corporal punishment of children. I don’t think these things should be making a comeback.

I don’t actually want us to relive some invented ‘glorious’ past. That sort of rhetoric is pretty much always poisoned by underlying nationalism and a desire to glamorize hierarchies that put one specific group (the group promoting the myth, usually) on top of the social structure, with no room for debate.

What I do want is to ask questions.

The pendulum of history tends to swing wildly back and forth in many areas of human endeavor. You have royal tyranny, then a revolution and a swing to ‘the rule of the people’. What was up must come down. Then the people get complacent and new tyrants climb to the top and start aggregating power in their own grubby hands again.

The same thing happens in other spheres - after Realism in art we got the stylizations of Impressionism and Art Nouveau. After dark and broody Baroque you had soft and fluffy Rococo. After parenting theories promoting not holding your baby to avoid ‘spoiling them’ and letting them cry alone in bed to ‘promote healthy sleeping habits’, we came to attachment parenting and carrying our babies on us everywhere like kangaroos.

The pendulum swing-swing-swings, we lean to one side, notice its flaws, then swing the other way. By the time we notice the other side also has flaws, we have collectively forgotten the flaws of the first side, so we head back there. The only thing we can’t seem to nail is balancing in the middle.

Which is a shame because the middle tends to have all the answers.

So to it is with our story of softness. Tough times breed hard men, hard men bring good times. Good times breed soft men, soft men bring tough times. Swing-swing.

Consider for a moment our physical softness. My kid got a papercut the other day, and he was lamenting the fact that it was annoying him so much. ‘It’s the tiniest cut, mom, you can barely see it!! And yet it’s making everything so difficult!!! Why am I so weak that such a tiny thing bothers me so much?!?’

He reminded me of a story his grandfather told us once, about how when he was a boy they would run around without shoes all summer - because you would only have one pair of shoes, and it was a waste to be using them when you didn’t have to - and by the end of it, the soles of their feet would develop such a thick hide, they could step on a tack and not even feel it.

I told him being soft was a privilege of sorts. It made me recall these Tumblr posts I saw a while back - I am not sure who the original creators are, but they never fail to make me smile:

To our ancestors, we would all seem rich and successful beyond measure, just for having hot water, 7/11s and prescription glasses. And some access to dental care. And that is a beautiful thing. Every generation (until the Boomers, apparently) has strived to work hard in order to reduce the suffering of the generation that came after it, and thus every generation has had it, in general, a little better. And has grown, for that part, a little softer.

I still remember my grandma working in the kitchen, throwing huge sheets of pastry to make phyllo by hand. I would NEVER. And it’s not like she had time for this because she spent all her time in the kitchen - this woman worked double shifts as a teacher at the school for children with disabilities - mostly cerebral palsy - and at the center for adult learning, teaching grown men and women to read and write, since literacy levels weren’t stellar after the war. She also sewed clothes for the entire family, because she was very much into looking good, and there was no Shein to order from.

So what made her able to do all these things without complaining, when I get tired just writing a paragraph about her? Was her generation somehow of fundamentally better quality than we of today?

My StackFriend Cian O Reilly mentioned in a recent comment to one of my texts how things would be better if only people weren’t so corruptible. But I don’t think we are corruptible as such. I think we are ADAPTABLE. And we adapt. We adapt to the bad things and the good. We adapt to having to work hard and we adapt to the creature comforts we have gained.

Photo credit: Christian Palma

Maria Lorena Ramirez Hernández, a Mexican woman of the Rarámuri/ Tarahumara people, has won or placed highly in a number of ultramarathon races running in her traditional dress and her handmade huarache sandals. No compression sole Nikes, no hydration vests, microfiber breathable blah blah I don’t really know what runners use, I wouldn’t even run to get away from a bear. But the reason she can just randomly show up to these extremely grueling sports events in her skirt and sandals and win, is because the Tarahumara live dispersed on a very large territory, covered in very rough terrain, so if they wanna go see someone, or buy something, or do anything at all outside of their small local group - they run.

And what do you know, that has made her really great at running.

She was offered a Nike sponsorship at one point and declined it by saying “People who wear them always run behind me.”

As for most people who grow up with a mom who can drive them around to every activity in an SUV, I’m gonna venture a guess that this does the opposite from making them really good at running.

Obviously that doesn’t mean that no kid today can run. Some will have the natural inclination. But I can guarantee you that, as a whole, we suck at running compared to people who are conditioned to regularly run from birth.

There is a phenomenon in fitness sometimes referred to as ‘old man strong’, or ‘farm strong’. It’s the sort of profound wiry strength you get from living a physical life, such as living on a farm. When we were moving apartments I noticed the same in our movers - these guys are of regular-looking build, no bulging muscles, no stunning trapeze-shoulders tapering to snatched waist. Very regular looking dudes. Often sort of skinny looking, really. Except then one of them casually lifts your entire couch.

I think we often forget to consider the old adage of ‘use it or lose it’ when we’re thinking of our societal development. What is not useful will wither and die out. Only it happens over long periods, so we don’t consciously perceive it. It’s the proverbial ‘frog in the pot’ situation - the water is heating up so slowly that the frog doesn’t notice until it’s too late and it’s already been cooked.

(I have heard this metaphor so many times and I desperately want to / don’t want to know where it comes from. Who was cooking live frogs slowly and for what purpose? I’m worried I will look it up and it will be as terrible as those baby eels in tofu and I will never be able to unknow it. No, do not look up the baby eels in tofu. Just don’t.)

So anyway, in many ways we are being slowly cooked by the comforts and benefits of our society. The shortcuts that we hoped would make our lives better are also taking things away, and sometimes I think we don’t realize how important and precious those things were.

We often mention the fact that people don’t write anymore, because there is no real need for it. And on the surface you can say ‘hey, so what?? Ok fair, we’re not writing, no one has nice handwriting anymore, most younger people never even learned cursive in school, but we objectively don’t need that skill anymore, so where exactly is the loss??? Are you sad we don’t have phone operator skills anymore? Are you mourning the loss of knowledge about the techniques of bloodletting?’

And I do take that point. As we have evolved, we have gained and lost many transient skills. Penmanship today would not carry the same weight as penmanship in the times of illuminated manuscripts and new editions of books being made by literally copying them out by hand.

But this is only the most superficial level on the writing skills benefit tree.

What about the brain-body connection we’re building through developing these fine motor skills? Yeah ok, you might say we don’t need fine motor skills anymore. What are we gonna do, thread needles? Repair watches?

Ok fine. What about memory? The act of physically writing things down for a lot of people actually aids memory and understanding, even if you never re-read what you wrote. By writing something with your own hand, you make it yours. You tame it, make friends with it. I would have never gotten through university without my mountains of hand-written notes. Writing something down once helps me remember more than reading it ten times.

Ok, you say, but isn’t typing just as good? What about recording the lessons? Everyone has different needs!! Get with the times!! We don’t need to remember things anyway, Google and AI know everything!

And…. yeah. There are people who are hugely helped by being allowed to type in class instead of writing, or to record lessons instead of taking notes, or to ‘write’ their assignments by using voice-to-text technology. That’s fine. I’m as glad that option exists for them as I am glad I have glasses to correct my shitty vision and people with broken legs have crutches.

But.

Photo credit: Vika Glitter via PEXELS

In my class of 36 kids, around 30 of us had no issues with reading. Out of the 6, four could probably have used some of these accommodations, and the remaining two could have used some sort of social worker intervention. Today in my kid’s class of 24 kids, more than half struggle with reading. Kids reach high school without basic reading skills. Kids go into a panic when they see too many words on a page. They’re failing reading comprehension tests at alarming rates.

So, what gives? Fluoride in the water? Aluminum in the vaccines? Why is this generation struggling so much more with reading than our generation did?

Use it or lose it.

We don’t make them read. We don’t make them write. We don’t make them memorize. We don’t make them analyze. We don’t teach cursive. We don’t give them novels until high school. We’ve made all the tests multiple choice. So is it weird, all other things being equal, that more and more kids just aren’t capable of handling what used to be basic reading and writing?

It’s not. Because we are adaptable. We have offered them an opportunity to not learn these things, and as rational beings that avoid unnecessary expenditure of energy, they have adapted to it. Yes, some outliers will still naturally be good at reading and writing, just as in our time some kids just couldn’t do it. But on the whole, it’s hard to deny that the standard is slipping.

Now whether and to what degree this is a terrible thing can, of course, be debated. We have lost lots of skills through history and it’s not like we actively miss them. Do I care that I don’t know how to make dry grass into rope and then weave that rope into a basket? …Actually yeah, a little. But it doesn’t keep me up at night. I’m definitely glad I don’t have to know how to skin a deer.

So I don’t really think any individual skill loss has to be a dreadful thing. Yes, we will lose the neural pathways for that particular task. It’s ok, we will develop new ones, for some other task. We are adaptable.

The problem is that, in the current societal setup, the TOTALITY of our skills is diminishing. We are not replacing reading with coding or skinning deer with astral projection. We are just…….. doing less.

Not in terms of time, oh god no. No one has a breathing moment to spare.

But in terms of the variety of our activities, we are doing less and less and less. We are losing skills and not replacing them. We are becoming reliant on services to do things for us. And we can all feel the effects, there’s no denying it. Our attention spans are eroding, our logical thinking is lacking, our research skills are nonexistent, our physical fitness is poor, we - are - not - thriving.

And of course it makes perfect sense. Every thing you do not become competent at shrinks your range of capacity and limits your very confidence in what you can do. Yes it was a pain in the ass for my grandmother to make her clothes from scratch, but it was also a sort of superpower. She knew she could do that. And her clothes looked amazing.

Of course reading an online summary of a novel is faster and easier than reading the actual novel. It might even give you a handy list of motifs and themes, so you don’t have to, like, actually read something and feel things in order to complete your writing assignment. Of course using ChatGPT is faster and easier than even reading the summary. But do we actually think those two ultimately give us the same amount of knowledge? Make us into the same person?

Do we ask ourselves - wait, why am I doing this? What is the purpose? To learn something or to simulate learning? To become a more capable person, or to fool others into thinking that’s what I am?

We are, more and more, simulating life instead of living it. Not doing any of the hard things means you are always on the surface level of experience. The less we do things, the harder everything seems. Isn’t that weird? Doesn’t it also make sense, really?

And then you realize you don’t have the focus or the stamina to read even one analytical article about the current political situation, far less the dozens and dozens you would have to read on each issue to get an actual feel for what’s happening at any given moment, you can barely make it through the TikTok rant about the topic without scrolling away - and that’s how we got here.

So I think we need a rethink. Not just about what we are trading for our comforts, but also what does that make us into. What is the ultimate benefit of all this convenience? I can see the benefits for the ruling class - the more systems we depend on for daily functioning, the less likely we are to jeopardize our access to them. You won’t start the revolution if it will cost you your daily latte. Thus, control.

But the benefits for us…?

Maybe we’d be better off suffering a little more, and shaping up a little firmer. Maybe we need to remember that, above all other things, we are adaptable - and we need to consciously decide what we want to be adapting to.