Chemical Constraints
Navigating Food and Drug use in a Brave New World
Sex, Beer, and Beetles
“Beauty is the intelligent verdict of a complex but mostly unconscious computation’’ - Donald Hoffman
In Australia, male jewel beetles buzz around looking for attractive females with nice shiny, dimpled, and brown backs to mate with. In the 1980s a new style of brown beer bottles happen to be manufactured that were much larger, shinier, and even more dimpled than the average female jeweled beetle. Even after mating with their female counterparts for thousands upon thousands of years, the males beetles not only confused the bottles for them, they preferred the bottles. The males would mount the large bottles and go at it until exhaustion, collapse into the dirt, then be devoured by ants. The lack of reproducing drove the species of Australian jewel beetles to the brink of extinction so the country decided to ban the bottles, eventually restoring the population.
The effect of the beer bottles is an example of a supernormal stimuli and as we alter the environment, more animals have experienced their negative consequences. But there is one species that we actively use supernormal stimuli against to manipulate- humans.
Our biology has evolved to only solve problems that concern surviving long enough to successfully pass on our genes. Some of these problems involve food, sex, and status. Most of our species’ solutions to these problems have been exploited by market forces, such as social media, dating apps, and junk food. A stimulus can be been hijacked, amplified, and mass produced, causing a normal response to transform into a maladaptive behavior. What was once a natural drive in our best interest, has been turned against us.
It makes perfect sense that 42% of adults in the US are obese when viewed through an evolutionary lens. The next caloric resource was never promised and fat was a useful reserve for times of famine. We evolved seek and indulge in energy dense foods such as sweet fruit when available. The problem is that we now have easily accessible, hyper-palatable, calorie-dense food products with no limits on availability. Binging on some seasonal berries is one thing, annihilating a family pack of Oreos that you will pass every week in the market is another. The drive to binge is natural, the store bought Oreos are not. When a supernormal stimuli like an Oreo is made cheaper and more convenient than a normal stimuli, resistance becomes futile.
It isn’t that people are bad or weak, they are simply animals living in a strange time where the environment doesn’t not match the built in instincts that were once necessary for survival.
“I can resist everything, except temptation” - Oscar Wilde
Coffee, Tabacco, and French Fries
We have an interesting relationship with not only food but drugs in America. There are few traditions to fall back on when administering drugs in our society. An aggressive anti-tobacco campaign has been waged against the US, which brought smoking down from 71.6% to 30.9% amongst males over a 30 year span1. Meanwhile in Peru, a nation that produces a large amount of tobacco and holds a projected revenue of 852 million dollars from the plant, the use of tobacco is only 9.6% and in Colombia it’s just 7.9%2.
One of many contributing differences in this culture is how the plant is used. Mapacho, or sacred father tobacco, has been grown here for over 1,000 years. Some pre-hispanic cultures used to eat the tobacco to illicit a powerful experience that would be in no means enjoyable and include heavy vomiting. Ironically, ingesting tobacco juice is used to treat smoking dependency (genius). One way mapacho is used differently is less for the buzz itself and more a symbolic means to cleanse, heal, or bless.
Rapè is a finely ground snuff containing tobacco that is administered by a facilitator forcefully blowing the powder through a pipe up the recipient’s nose. What stood out to me about the administration process of rapè is how ceremonial it felt. I sat waiting while it was prepared in the pipe, then with eyes closed I was touched on the head followed by the chest in prayer-like symbolic gestures. I took a breath and held it as the pellet of snuff was shot up my nostril, like a punch to the face. My eyes welled with tears- it was beautiful. Surprisingly, when I was offered some in a city apartment by a friend in a completely different setting, the exact same ritualistic steps were repeated- this is the power of drug-use wrapped in the sticky adhesive of culture.
The difference between hitting a cotton candy flavored vape and receiving rapè is comparable to the difference between popping a coffee pod in your Keurig and spending your morning hand grinding fresh roasted coffee beans, boiling your water to the exact temperature, and swirling it around the filter of a Pour Over. It’s not about efficiency or convenience as much as it is the meaning and experience. Making coffee is a ritual.
“Eat all the junk food you want - as long as you cook it yourself!” - Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan once made the argument that the biggest factor in a healthy meal was not the nutrient composition as much as who cooked it. You could eat fries whenever you wanted he said, as long as you traveled to the store, bought the potatoes, then washed them, sliced them, and fried/baked them.
The worst thing about fast food isn’t necessarily the food, it’s the fast. The time and energy required to prepare a meal from scratch is going to limit the frequency in which you eat them. Cooking is a ritual with many steps built in that act as barriers between the food and your stomach. Whether it’s relationships or diet, abundance and convenience do not equal more fulfillment.
Ayahuasca, Arranged Marriage, and Diets
Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard. - Barry Shwartz
Religious people tend to be happier, healthier, and more satisfied in their relationships when compared with non-religious people in the US. They provide community and more opportunity to engage in non-digital socialization but more importantly they constrain choice through a set of rules. The strictness of the organization seems to be correlated with its effectiveness, which is why “cultish” groups such as AA see higher success rates.
Even drugs can be transformed into a sacrament through religious context. The UDV is a church originating in Brazil (now in the US) which has harnessed use of the powerful psychedelic compound, Ayahuasca, through formal religion. The church screens members, requires abstinence from other substances prior to the ceremony, supervises their trip, and most importantly, interprets (explains) the experience through a religious framework to promote a consistency amongst the community. Recreational use through ayahuasca tourism or homemade pharmahuasca contain none of these social pressures.
In individualistic societies we expect the individual to regulate their own behavior. We promote personal responsibility and will power. Collectivist societies, on the other hand, will have communal safety nets in place to guard against the desires of the individual. This is good and bad. The good of individualistic society is the freedom of controlling our own behavior, they bad is the burden of controlling our own behavior.
A good example of a collectivist practice are arranged marriages in India.
In India, 93% of marriages were arranged and 75%-80% of young people want their families to choose their life partner3. When surveyed, the majority of married respondents considered the relationship with their spouse as their greatest source of happiness in their life. There are plenty of obvious downsides to arrange marriages, but everything is a trade-off. Currently the divorce rate in the US is around 50%. In India It’s around 1%.
“Well, life needs constraints…”- Mark Zuckerburg’s response when asked what he thought about death.
Thanks to the endless options provided by dating apps, we can now maximized our choice. We go through all the options for the best pick, causing us to even more selective. We are no longer just looking for love (even this is progressive), but “the one”, our soul-mate, our best friend even. We can’t shake the feeling that the grass is just a little greener on the other side.
Variety is not the spice of life, hunger is.
Whether choosing romantic relationships or how we eat, our individualistic society values the desires of the individual. IIFYM is a diet built around personal choice- as long as it fits your macros, you can have it. But when researchers allowed people to self-select a lower carb vs high carb diet based on what they enjoyed, they didn’t improve their diet adherence4. Allowing people to choose which diet they wanted to follow, sometimes even reduced success5. People who dieted based on their personal preference lost significantly less weight on average than people without a choice6.
We see the same thing in learning styles. Some consider themselves more visual learners, while others more auditory, or kinesthetic (hands-on). But decades worth of research has shown time and time again that students allowed to choose their preferred learning style, do not perform any better.
Choice can be a burden and the belief that we intuitively know what is best for ourselves proves not always accurate. It turns out, the performance of meal plans beat self-selected diets just as arranged marriages beat self-selected partners.
Drugs, Food, Training
So how do we limit decision-fatigue in an individualistic society? How do we place barriers between easily accessible stimuli and their consumption? How can we regulate the things we seek by placing more steps within the process of obtaining them? The hard way. We have to implement our own rules and meaning. We have to change our own environment. We have to create our own rituals.
Here is a list of the behavioral constraints I use to regulate supernormal stimuli such as drugs, foods, and even training. Some are physical constraints (space) , some are chronological constraints (time) , some categorical constraints (meaning) , behavioral constraints (actions) , and ceremonial constraints (ritual).
Categorical Constraints