fun facts

calinet · 2021-08-21T15:18:04.457279-07:00

how do ants know when another ant is dead? when ed wilson was a young assistant professor at harvard in the 1950s, he observed that when ants die — and if they're not crushed and torn apart — they just lie there, sometimes upside down, feet in the air, while their sister ants (almost all ants in a colony are ladies) walk right by without a glance. that is until about two days after an ant's passing, ed discovered, when the corpse appears to emit a chemical signal that changes the living ants' behavior dramatically. all of a sudden what was once a pile of gunk on the colony floor becomes a "problem to be solved." once the signal is in the air, any ant that happens by grabs the corpse and carries it through the colony to a refuse pile designated the graveyard and dumps it on a mound of also-dead ants. ed, who would revolutionize the study of ants by exploring their ability to communicate with smell, decided to figure out what chemicals equal "i am dead" to an ant. in his autobiography, naturalist, he wrote: "i thought, maybe with the right chemicals i could create an artificial corpse." finally, after much sifting and mixing, ed discovered that oleic acid — just a teeny drop of it — was all the ants had to sniff to think "dead!" and, because he could — ed had a colony parked in his harvard lab so he could watch them endlessly — one day he took a drop of the chemical and gently deposited it on an ant that had the misfortune of walking by. ed describes how as soon as he dabbed the ant, the next ant that came near grabbed his ant, slung it on its back, hiked over to the graveyard and though the ant was very much alive — "kicking, you know," says ed — flung it onto the refuse pile. dead is what you smell — not what you see — if you are an ant. so, though it tried to clean itself over and over, the minute it returned to the colony, it was grabbed, carried and slung back on the pile.

that emptiness that comes when you reach the summit: hedonic adaptation. you succeeded. you got that job you wanted, you finished that big project, you pulled that car of your dreams up to your front door. for months you focused on that moment, you went sleepless, you took risks. and the moment came. so why did it only last 15 minutes? why, the day after that big success, did your mind immediately start searching for the next "deprivation" target, as if nothing had happened?

the answer is simple but unsettling: your brain is fooling you. in psychology this is called hedonic adaptation. the human mind has evolved to accept every new level it reaches as the "new normal" in record time. you finish a construction, and that building is now just a pile of concrete to you. you earn a fortune, and a week later it's now your "ordinary" balance.

the eye-opening truth here is this: as long as you index happiness to "acquiring," you're doomed to run on a hamster wheel. no matter how fast you run, the wheel will keep turning at the same speed. most people try to solve this trap with "more ambition"; they work more, earn more, want more. but this is just turning the wheel faster.

real mastery (and real peace) begins here:

– change the finish line: index your goal not to a "result" (money, property, title) but to a "level of mastery." results undergo adaptation, but deepening in something, that is, the "learning process," is resistant to adaptation.
– architect the process: that emptiness you feel when you reach the goal isn't actually a failure; it's the system's signal to "look for a new challenge." if you use this signal not to buy a new "toy" but to gain a new "skill," you become the architect of the system rather than its slave.

in short: if the thing you desired suddenly loses its meaning once you reach it, it means you're targeting the wrong thing. it's not what you have but who you become that nourishes you. next time you reach a goal, don't ask "what did i gain?" ask "who did i become on this path?" this is the only way to get off the wheel.