Savannah

Before stories, your brain lived on the savannah.

The Savannah appears in the red light of predawn. The sun hasn’t risen yet but you’re awake. No alarm. Your body just knows. Around you, maybe thirty people. You know every one of them by name, by smell, by footprint.

Today you’ll walk, maybe fifteen kilometers. You’ll find food or you won’t. By nightfall you’ll sit by a fire and someone will tell a story about the hunt. This is Tuesday. This is also Saturday. This is every day for a hundred thousand years.

There is a moment every morning, just before full consciousness, when your brain doesn’t know what century it is. For a few seconds you’re pure hardware made for a different world. For a few seconds your brain is back on the savannah.

Here, nobody has a career plan. Nobody lays awake at 3 AM wondering if they were falling behind. The cortisol is your friend, to squeeze some fats and proteins, juice your blood with sugar, and buy you the 3 minutes of heroic sprint so the lion can’t get you. Life is hard, but it’s what your body and mind are made for.

Your eyes have opened. You missed the alarm. Your cortisol is still high, but your endocrine system is confused: where the hell is the damn lion?

The Mismatch

50,000–200,000 years ago, our brains stopped evolving, but our environment hasn't. Quite the opposite — it changed beyond recognition:

10,000 years ago, agriculture broke our bodies and social structure. Humans got shorter, sicker, and more malnourished, but wealth accumulation became possible. Society split into classes.

250 years ago, industrialization broke time and meaning. We replaced sunset with alarm and built identities around hours of output.

15 years ago, social media went straight after your brain. This time the algorithm didn't need to force submission—it was easier to use what was already there.

Today our 200,000-year-old hardware runs software updates from the Pleistocene. The cortisol that evolved for 3-minute sprints now handles 3-year mortgage anxiety. Sometimes I ask myself: what was the evolutionary purpose of the emotion I feel? How is my savannah endocrine system trying to help?

The Detour

If you can’t imagine the incoming disruption of work—a future where there may be no more jobs for most of us—remember that for 95% of human history, nobody had one. You could be a shaman, a hunter, a mother, but those were not jobs. It was your role in the tribe, your contribution, your purpose, or your fate. The idea of doing repetitive mechanical and computational tasks on schedule is largely the product of industrialization.

What happened to the savannah man? The coal mine turned him into a machine. The office turned him into a computer. Neither provides meaning directly connected to his life. His atomized family has no stable tribe. His skin sees no sun. The only thing he gets is a handful of tokens to exchange for food, shelter, and pleasure. But 250 years of industrialization is a mere 0.1% dent on the human timeline—a detour.

The Happiness Checklist

Before that, the happiness checklist was simple: food, sleep, movement, shelter, love, tribe, and purpose. All self-help advice is reverse-engineering the savannah default.

On the list, you’ll not find quarterly targets, likes and followers, money—things that simply can’t make you happy because happiness is part of programming coded before they existed.

The checklist matters because the savannah man is still here. Living in his savannah body, and savannah brain, in a weirder and increasingly alien reality. We all know the dark versions of the story: Terminators exterminating humankind, the human farms from the Matrix, or Wall-E where machines make humans obsolete and fat.

But what if the AI disruption, for the first time since agriculture, doesn't just break another part of the familiar landscape—but gives some part of it back? What if instead of living the life of a corporate robot, you can finally go back to the checklist?

✦

I'm writing this on a Friday evening. There's no lion, no coal mine, no quarterly targets. Just a man telling a story to his tribe. If you squint, the screen almost looks like a fire.