Hi, I’d like to present an idea:
“Supernormal stimulus poses the greatest existential threat to our species.”
 
Modern-day global extinction rates are at about 100 to 1000 times background rates[1]. The main cause of that is habitat destruction[2]. If you were to picture, as geneticist Sewall G. Wright did in 1932[3], a landscape of evolutionary fitness values denominated by height relative to the set of all possible genotype variances—you could imagine what happens to a particular organism as this landscape of fitness shifts its shape beneath it.
As the environment to which your genes have adapted changes, you may find that the evolutionary summit you’ve once ascended is suddenly a valley.
 
We’ve seen the rates of depression[4], anxiety[5] and suicide[6]  skyrocket among young adults and children. Our attention spans have been getting worse[7][8]. Opioid crises ravage countries such as the US[9]–and, as most see it, this is not great but overall we’re better. Obesity epidemic[10] aside, a common inability to sleep unmedicated[11] aside, we have greater luxuries and live lives much improved compared to previous generations. “So what?” if the first thing I do every morning is check my phone, that’s an easy fix; no big deal.
And that’s true.
Except, that we’re not minding, fundamentally, why this is happening; the root cause to these symptoms, and the subsequent implications. That though it may not seem this way at first, the habitat of our species, too, has transformed dramatically over the past few decades.
The argument I’ll make today is simple: That our present surrounding environment—though it may seem roughly similar to the way it was a century ago—is anything but. I’ll derive from this a new category of existential risk, and follow it by introducing some bad solutions we’re likely to attempt but that will not work as well as one flawed solution that will work, but that we’re, frankly, very unlikely to attain. And finally, I’ll make the case that endeavoring toward that very solution is no less than the single greatest moral imperative of our time.
 
 
The Comfort Warrior knows this intuitively, not skewed by a life lived for many decades outside comfort’s oversaturated influence; by a youth of habits resistant to it, by mistaking it for luxury. He/she are the canary in the coal mine. They know it on their skin. They know the very real horror of not being able to trust yourself to maintain a semblance of dignity. Not being able to trust yourself with freedom.
Because if despite your best efforts at discipline you still find yourself at rock-bottom time and time again, then something, clearly, is very wrong. If cognitive, physical and emotional fitness are what you’re going for, not necessarily always aware of it—likely not—but during rare moments of intense clarity understand with clear-visioned certainty that you are not the way you should be, and yet despite that you still continually fail at your efforts—then something, undoubtedly, has gone terribly awry.
And it may be that you’re fighting the wrong fight; engaged all this time in combat with an enemy unknown. That you don’t lack passion, but that you’ve been consumed by it. That following your intuition has failed you, that seeking discipline congruently is precisely what has led you again and again to disaster.
So educate yourself on the topic of superstimuli. It’s time you’ve understood that which you’ve been facing,