Selkirk days: why modern life is making us dumb and angry

Alexander Selkirk ate a lot of feral goat - but he was pretty happy about it.

Selkirk was a Scottish member of the Royal Navy and, from 1704 t o 1709, lived as a castaway on a tiny island in the South Pacific Ocean. For four and a half years, Selkirk lived off of goats, cabbage tree, and whatever else he could scrounge up on the island now known as Robinson Crusoe Island. He stargazed, made his own clothes, and recruited local cats to chase rats away.

He was alone, without a soul to speak to, for years.

The only thing he had to do each day was live.

When Selkirk was eventually returned home, he began to return to a modern life in London. This time with some degree of celebrity and wealth unlike anything he had hoped to have before. Soon after, Selkirk got into scraps, started drinking heavily, and generally seemed pretty unhappy.

“I am now worth eight hundred pounds, but shall never be as happy as when I was not worth a farthing.”

I can see why. While we’ve mastered the science of sailing ships and silicon chips, we’re all working off of the same evolutionary software that was designed to just help us survive - to hunt goats, build fires, and gaze up at the stars.

For generations now, and at an increasing rate, we’ve been faced with an increasing onslaught of information: whether in words, numbers, sounds, sights, and perhaps most importantly: decisions. For Selkirk, each day would have presented only a few decisions to make - where would he go foraging today? Did he need to make another goatskin coat? Should he climb to the top of that ridge again?

In the modern world, we’re hit with information and decisions the moment we wake up. Emails, news alerts, choices about what we make for breakfast, what we wear to work, how we’re going to make it to the gym today. An endless scroll of social media. Its an overwhelming amount of information that we were never designed to be able to process - and our capacity is limited.

But the trouble is we’re not just dealing with information - we have stress. On Selkirk’s island, he was blessed with enough water, food, and shelter, that the most he had to worry about was a Spanish ship turning up once or twice or being bitten by a rat. He wasn’t worried about global instability, economic downturns, armed conflict, or climate change. He didn’t have to worry about paying a mortgage or keeping a job.

He had the mental space to breathe. To think. To look up at the stars and wonder.

And I think that’s the biggest loss for humanity, in all the modern trappings of the information age we live in: we’ve lost the ability to think deeply about subjects.

Its no wonder that mis and disinformation is on the rise. That our political divides have gotten deeper, and our ability to empathise with each other has started to waste away.

When our brains are overwhelmed with information and decisions, we don’t have the time or mental capacity to look deep into subjects. We skim. We go with headlines, soundbites, and whatever a guy on a podcast or a stage tells us is true.

When we’re also stressed, we look for threats. And the most likely threat is someone else. Or a group.

I’ve been talking to people a lot lately about how its somewhat futile to talk to people about concepts like human rights, pluralism, or even democracy when the average person is stressed, distracted, and overwhelmed with information. But I really do think we’re at a breaking point - the future of our society relies on innovation, common ground, and making big decisions.

We won’t be able to do any of that unless we have the time to look up at the stars, and at each other. Or you know, read a book.

More time with less decisions, less notifications, less noise - it sounds nice. Selkirk's days on a deserted island, sound, bizarrely, like a relief. Sure, I still need to pay bills and feed my kid (probably not feral goat), but the lack of information sounds nice.

Maybe we all need a 'Selkirk day', at least once a week?