For most of human history this was not a picture. It was reality. The person who did not find food went hungry. The person who did not stay warm froze. The person who did not notice danger in time did not grow old. Nature was a strict teacher, and it did not give many chances. Those who managed had children, and the children inherited some of the same will to get through. That is how we became what we are, generation after generation, shaped by necessity.
Today it is different. I can open the fridge without thinking about where the food came from. The heat is there when I wake. If I get ill, someone receives me. If I lose my job, there is a safety net. That is an enormous victory. Few things in history are more worth celebrating than the fact that so many of us do not have to fight for our lives every day.
Still, I sometimes sit with a strange feeling. What happens to an ability that is no longer used? A muscle that is never loaded wastes away. Does the same apply to the will to look after yourself?
I see people around me struggling with things that would have seemed almost incomprehensible to our great-grandparents. Getting up in the morning. Making a proper meal. Going to bed on time, moving, keeping the finances in order. Not because they are lazy, but because something in them no longer seems to sound the alarm. The inner voice that said “now you have to” has become quieter. Maybe because it has so rarely been right lately.
It is tempting to say that prosperity has made us soft. That comfort has taken something essential from us. It is an old thought, and it may have something to it. When the consequences disappear, some of the drive disappears too. Why should the body mobilise when nothing is at stake?
I am not sure that is the whole truth. The instinct is not gone. It is aimed at other things.
Think about how we react to a notification on the phone. Something jerks in us, the same way it jerked in the hunter who heard a twig snap. Think about how we hunt for recognition, for small signs that we belong to the group. That is the old survival machinery, running at full speed. It just points in a different direction than before.
Maybe that is where the real question sits. Not whether we have lost the ability to survive, but whether the world we have built rewards the right things. Before, you were rewarded for doing what kept you alive. Food gave fullness. Rest gave strength. Community gave safety. The reward and the need belonged together.
Today they can go separate ways. What tastes best is not always what nourishes. What gives a kick is not always what builds us. Working life rewards availability more than rest. Screens reward attention more than presence. We follow the signals we inherited, and still end up somewhere we would never have chosen.
If that is so, it is maybe unfair to say that people have failed. Maybe we have built surroundings that do not speak our language. An animal in a foreign landscape will act wrongly, not because it is weak, but because the landscape does not match what the animal was made for.
At the same time I do not want to let myself off too easily. Even if the surroundings pull at us, we have something the first humans rarely got to use: the chance to stop and choose. We can see the patterns. We can ask ourselves what actually keeps us alive, not only in the body, but in the mind and in our relationships.
Maybe that is what survival means now. Not fighting cold and hunger, but recognising what we need, in a world that offers everything else. It is a quieter fight. It has no predators and no winter. It is not less important.
I do not know if we are at a turning point in a development that has lasted hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe we are only in a transition, where the old instinct has not yet found its place in the new. Maybe we learn it over time. Maybe we have to rebuild some of what we have made, so that it can work.
Either way, I think the question is worth carrying. Not as an accusation, but as an invitation. What in your life is it that really keeps you alive? And are you rewarded for exactly that?