A common explanation for obesity is that we are not designed to handle an abundance of food. According to this view, the brain seeks energy sources (food) and has a difficulty passing up on them when they are available, because in our ancestral environment (which we are adapted to) food was scarce.
I’ve always had a problem with this explanation.
If this was true, we should expect over 95% of the population to be obese, given the extreme abundance of food we live in, but that’s not what we see. Sure, some countries have very high obesity rates, but it’s not correlated with the abundance of food or wealth. Japan has far lower obesity rates than the US. And while the obesity rate in the US has reached nearly 40% in the year 2020, it was around 12% in the year 1980: it’s not as though there was not an abundance of food prior to the eighties.
The chart below shows how the obesity rate in Japan (a very rich country) is comparable to that of Afghanistan (a very poor country). We also see Egypt, which is much poorer than Japan, has much higher obesity rate, approaching (but still lower than) that of the United States.
This clearly shows that abundance of food or wealth is not the cause for obesity; it’s not even correlated.
Note that chart is for obesity, not just being overweight.
If we include the rate of people who are overweight (which includes obese people), the numbers are slightly higher, but the end result is not that different.
Now, this view of motivation is part of a more general view that sees the brain only doing things it can immediately see the benefit for. The common evolutionary explanation given for this is that in our ancestral environment, certain things were strongly correlated with survival and reproduction, and the brain is programmed to find these things pleasurable so that we are motivated to pursue them.
Under this view, the reason we don’t regularly go to the gym is that our brain can’t see the point: it takes years of consistent training to start seeing result, and going to the gym once sounds like a fruitless exercise to the brain. Additionally, our ancestors never needed to go to the gym because living itself entailed rigorous physical activity; or at least so goes the claim.
This explanation again has problems. The majority of people do things they hate everyday, such as going to work (or school) and enduring the traffic/commute to and from. No one thinks to themselves “I wish I had the motivation to go to work everyday”. They just go to work; even if they hate it
Furthermore, if that view was correct, civilization would never get started: why would anyone “farm” food? Farming takes a lot of effort and hard work. It takes months for the crop to mature. Some crops take years. It would be a lot faster to go hunt for wild animals and just collect fruits from the forest.
It only gets more difficult from there. How would cities arise? How would professions arise? Why would anyone spend years studying some subject for the lofty promise of maybe being able to earn a living from it after years and years of practice?
Civilization hinges upon the vast majority of people performing tasks they don’t necessarily enjoy or see an immediate benefit to, every single day.
Even when it comes to physical exercise: soldiers have always had to train; so training at the gym is not exactly a new thing.
So far, we’ve ruled out two common popular explanations for motivation:
You only do things you find sensory pleasure in.You only do things you can see an immediate benefit to.
Habits & Social Status
I think it is true that on a day to day level, the mind does not think in terms of the longterm or the big picture. It uses heuristics that move you generally in the “right” direction.
It’s also not entirely false that our behavior is motivated by expected reward/benefit, and expected punishment/loss.
It’s just that benefit and loss evaluations are not based merely on physical sensations. Instead, I think most of our actions are based on percieved “social” benefits: we do things that we think would get us social approval and avoid things that we think would bring upon us social rejection.
We try to maintain (and improve) our social standing: how other people view us.
The reason people go to work despite hating it is that everyone expects them to. Almost everyone in society, but specially your immediate social environment, expects you to work in order to get a stable income stream. If you don’t go to work, you risk your social standing: people will think less of you, they will avoid associating with you, etc.
“Peer Pressure”
The term “peer pressure” seems to have generally negative connotations. Problematic teen behavior is often explained in large part by peer pressure.
I’d argue that almost everything we do can be explained by passive peer pressure.
If all your friends practice soccer everyday, it will be very hard to not practice soccer everyday (and to be a couch potato instead), especially when your family members also expect you to practice your favorite sports with your friends.
If on the other hand, all your friends play card games and expect you to play with them, it will be hard to dedicate time to practice soccer instead of playing card games. It’ll be even harder if your immediate family doesn’t want you to play soccer and instead tell you to focus on homework and studying.
Maintaining and enhancing our social status is far more important to our brain than any physical pleasures or pains, and will easily override it.
Fat people usually come from fat families, where the shared enjoyment of food is one of the main social activities that bond family members together.
People who are not fat usually come from families that are not fat and who don’t rely on food as the bonding activity. They will quickly shame any family member who demonstrates gluttonous behavior, such eating too much snacks, or doing so outside the family specified snack time.
Outsourcing to the group
I think a useful framework to think about this is that the brain is outsourcing part of its decision making to the group. Instead of having to think for yourself about the long term consequences of every single decision you make, you just let the group tell you.
If your social group guides your behavior in the direction that makes it “frawned upon” to indugle in food or to sit on the couch all day long, then you will gain the benefit of staying fit.
This is why culture exists. Culture is not just the natural aggregate of individual behavior. Cultures are often designed deliberately to guide people’s behaviors in a direction deemed beneficial to society.
When a cultural norm is shared by many cultures across the globe, that’s a pretty good indication that it serves some important function and is not arbitrary.
This is why the desire for “freedom” from culture is generally misguided. By liberating yourself from societal norms, you subject yourself to your base desires, which now will take a tremendous amount of effort (personal will / discipline) to overcome.
When a whole culture decides to let go of cultural norms, you get a culture of people who chase base sensual desires. This is why obesity is rampant in the US but not in Japan. This is why all the vices and degeneracy comes from the US: it’s the homeland of the idea of “freedom form culture is a good thing”.
“Lifting the stigma”
One of the most devistating ideas to emerge from the American Left is the notion that to help people we must remove the social stigma against them. Lift the social stigma around being fat, around having a mental illness, around being addicted to drugs, around being homeless.
And predictably, what you get when you lift the social stigma against something, is more of it. More people get addicted to drugs. More people become homeless. More people talk themselves into having a mental illness and needing therapy.
More devistating is idea that we must “celebrate” the degeneracy that was until recently heavily stigmatized. “Celebrating” means giving a huge amount of social approval.
When the teachers at a school teach kids to “celebrate” being a “gender queer”, they are sending a strong signal to these kids that they can improve their social standing within the school by “coming out as gender queer”. The result? A dramatic increase in the number of teens and pre-teens who proclaim to “identify as gender queer”.
Yes, stigma is uncomfortable. That’s a good thing.
A society that wishes to propser does not encourage self-destructive behavior. It might tolerate the presence of a small minority that engages in self-destructive behaviors, but it would design the culture so that such behavior is suppressed and not allowed to spread like a cancer through out society.