It's a curious thing that we'd want sugar at all given it's supposed to be so bad for us. I mean, why would our brains have evolved in a way that it would crave anything that would be detrimental to body? Why do I have to fight my brain's urges for sugar to keep it on the straight and narrow eating a whole food plant based diet? Sugar is bad for you *and* it drives healthy behavior in nature. This starts to make sense when you consider sugar doesn't exist in nature as boxes full of crystals. It's out there, but it's wound up in things like fruit hanging in trees. So you'd have to go around looking for those trees and climb them to get the fruit. The fruit itself was full of fiber and all kinds of nutritional goodness. It's hard to imagine today that getting calories was once a struggle. But in that struggle, landing on a calorie and nutritionally dense food was such a reward-worthy behavior that our brains assuredly should push us to go after it. The trouble began when we discovered we could just give our cravings exactly what they were after absent what we drove ourselves to do and consume to get it: pure, isolated sugar. Now the sugar wasn't driving healthy behaviors, it was just driving eating sugar. ## Consider Entertainment  When you go to see a play, have you noticed you don't have to sit through eight hours of the characters sleeping in beds in the dark with no dialogue in between scenes? Instead, the play will just let you know a day has passed. It will cut out long stretches of time that aren't worth your attention. You don't even have to leave the building to go see a scene somewhere else. Instead they will change it all on the very same stage. You can lean back and let the choreographing of the play as a whole tell you what is worth paying attention to when. Movies work much the same way, they just point a camera at a play. Why does it feel good to have something external from us take the wheel of our attention? Why do we call it "entertainment" to hand over the course of our attention span to someone else for ninety minutes? Whatever it is, it must be the reason we love when entertainment is condensed and accelerated further. It must explain why distilling it down to its bare essence of scrolling through short-form video content fed by an algorithm is an insatiable experience we can't seem to separate ourselves from. Entertainment is probably rooted in a clever survival adaptation: communities. Look at dogs and cats. Dogs are communal creatures, who use they synergy of a pack for survival and protection. Cats are individualistic hunters. This is why dogs use toys very differently than cats. For cats, it's about the hunt, catching and conquering they toy. Dogs want to engage with you. They chase the toy, but they bring it back. They look forward to the drama and want to play tug-of-war with you. Assembling into tribes allowed humans to collect resources and support each other far beyond how any one human on their own could. So there's a reason stories aren't as interesting without a villain. Entertainment needs conflict. It tickles the same parts of our brain that draw us to engage in the messiness of community dynamics. We've come a long way from having to go to another building, paying to get in, to have actors meticulously cut up a bunch of scenes for us to keep us entertained, to now where you can take your phone out of your pocket and with a few simple swipes of your finger you get to feed your attention span what it's longing for. Ultimately, all of this has become a kind of **attention span sugar**. And once again, the sugar doesn't drive the healthy behavior anymore, it just driving the sugar itself. Just as sugar got us to climb up the tree, the prospect of drama and stories and people got us to interact with one another and form tribes. Rejection feels bad because in nature, being removed from a community was a literal death sentence. In turn, belonging feels good because it assures survival.  And just as we eat less fruit when we find out we can get the sugar on its own, we spend less time around people if we find a social sugar substitute. This is what is really at the core of the "phones are bad" conversation. Phones aren't bad anymore than a grocery store is unhealthy. Both are just marketplaces that happen to also dispense sugar. All of this technology found its way from military projects into fun devices that fit in our pockets because it was branded to us as "innovation." Technology is not the enemy, but we have a habit of thinking innovation is about making things easier. But ease is all about removing a struggle. Struggle is how we thrive. Climbing the fruit tree is a struggle. Climbing makes us stronger. Being stronger makes the climbing easier. More climbing means more fruit. Being part of a community isn't always easy but it's that very struggle that makes it matter and literally keeps us alive. This is the proper diet for our attention spans, not the cheap sugar substitute. So we can let ourselves off the hook. We can stop telling ourselves how "bad" we are that we keep picking up our phone and wasting time with doom scrolling. We are operating normally. It's these external things that are hijacking a healthy response mechanism.  We are promised the innovation we want but we are also its victims. But the truth is that Innovation was never supposed to be about making things easier, it's was about making us more human. ![[Partials#^eaec46]]