Why Cavemen Didn’t Want Sports Cars…
When I was just four years old, I wanted a Woody toy. He was my favourite character from the Disney film Toy Story.
Though if I’d been born in 1980, or 1880, I wouldn’t have wanted a ‘Woody’.
We know a lot about early civilisation from cave paintings and archaeological research. Without ever having read a book on this subject, I can safely say that despite the many records on cave walls, there are no paintings of Ferraris or Lamborghinis by cavemen.
I think it’s because cavemen did not appreciate fast cars.
When I was a bit older, maybe ten this time, I saw my friends playing with Yugi-Oh cards at school. I went home and started watching this show on weekday mornings with my brother.
Then, we both went and demanded of our mother that we might too get Yugi-Oh cards.
When I was eleven, I begged my mother for a mobile phone.
And I got it. It swiveled around at the top, and old Motorolla which now belongs in a museum. It is now quite normally in the West for eleven-year-olds to have mobile phones.
But no child who grew up in the seventeenth century ever bugged their parents to get a mobile phone, and they didn’t seem bothered by the prospect, just like the cavemen and sports cars.
Is there any more complicated combination of two words in the language of man than ‘I want’.
I’m in my twenties now. What’s changed? In the world around me, amongst those my age, the pattern has not changed. Just the objects.
If I told you now that my deepest craving was to receive a new Woody toy or Yugi-Oh cards, you’d laugh me off the page. Because it is not socially acceptable for me to do so.
Well, to hell with you.
That’s when you realise that you don’t really want the things you want. The term “I want” is an abbreviation of so much. “I want” rarely means that “I”, a completely independent and rational being, covets or “wants” something for its merits alone.
We all want things in context. We are made to want them because of our peers, what we see in films and what we see over the neighbours fence. We are wired to want, or ‘desire’ things in this way… because at an early stage in evolution such an inbuilt mechanism served us well to survive.
We wanted to have as much food or crops as our neighbours. Now, times have changed.
Most people go their whole lives without realising…
Most people go their whole lives without ever realising that they they didn’t really want the things they wanted – they only wanted them because they thought others wanted them.
That is not you, nor will it ever be so long as there is breath in my lungs
