Ancestors Motivational Quotes

Our ancestors have invented, we can at least innovate.

Man will never be stronger nor independent if he lives under perpetual motivation of others.

I travel to the ancient world by reading ancient books.

There were three things sought by invaders who crossed oceans to discover America. Those were gold, gospel, glory. There are four things sought by aliens who crossed heavens to discover planet earth. Those are gold, gospel, glory, gene.

We ought to know the history of our ancient ancestors.

Are you considering becoming a creative person? Too late, you already are one. To even call somebody "a creative person" is almost laughably redundant; creativity is the hallmark of our species. We have the sense for it; we have the curiosity for it; we have the opposable thumbs for it; we have the rhythm for it; we have the language and the excitement and the innate connection to divinity for it. If you're alive, you're a creative person. You and I and everyone you know are descended from tens of thousands of years of makers. Decorators, tinkerers, storytellers, dancers, explorers, fiddlers, drummers, builders, growers, problem-solvers, and embellishers--these are our common ancestors.

Our ancestors have a vested interest in our wellbeing and so are more easily motivated to intercede for us and also are more closely connected to us.

Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive

The mystery of existence will always remain a mystery. All we know for sure is what the ancients knew: each succeeding generation forms a link in the braided cord of humanity. Each of our lives is shallower if we do not know and pay homage to where we came from. The past forms the world that we currently inhabit, and our actions today, comparable to our ancestors’ actions of yesterday, will reverberate in the history of tomorrow. While the tools of our trades evolve from generation to generation, the way that people behave and the motives behind their behavior remains constant. Each generation must chart the same dangerous territories of the heart. Each succeeding generation must diagnosis the illnesses that imperil their mental, physical, social, and economic wellbeing. Life is brutally painful and extraordinary joyful.

Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books. Humans should hold it up in their hands every single day of their lives and say from the deepest fathoms of their soul – “I am free – to think – to speak – to act – the way a real, novel, civilized being should – my ancestors couldn’t, but I can, and my children will”.

Similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest islands evidence of the existence of birds, insects and snails that lived there for countless generations, only to vanish when the first human farmers arrived. None but a few extremely remote islands escaped man’s notice until the modern age, and these islands kept their fauna intact. The Galapagos Islands, to give one famous example, remained uninhabited by humans until the nineteenth century, thus preserving their unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like the ancient diprotodons, show no fear of humans. The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans.

Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from plants that died long ago. We can give thanks to these ancestors of our present-pay foliage, but we can't give back to them. We can, however, give forward. When we are unable to return the favor, we can pay it forward to someone or something else. Using this approach, we can see ourselves as part of a larger flow of giving and receiving throughout time. Receiving from the past, we can give to the future. When tackling issues such as climate change, the stance of gratitude is a refreshing alternative to guilt or fear as a source of motivation.

So much can be learnt by observing motivations of our ancestors

Till our next generations are not taught about the price paid by our ancestors to retain our identity, the will wind up choosing wrong Heroes.

Gravity is the God and the Sun is the Son of God as our ancestors tried to teach us, they were scientists with unstoppable creativity

Doing anything because your ancestors wanted to do it— fulfilling someone else’s ambition— is a poor motivation.

My ancestors are my greatest motivation!

They had wanted to live as their own grandparents had dreamed of living, before Restoration, and yet doing anything because of your ancestors wanted to do it- fulfilling someone else's ambition- is a poor motivation.

Words allowed our ancestors to communicate their needs and agree on shared rules and goals. But when it came to building emotional rapport and motivating people to prioritize the needs of the group over personal desires, language was woefully inadequate. Song and dance instilled a sense of community on a visceral level. By being united in the same rhythm, people didn’t just think of themselves as part of a group; they saw, heard, and felt a harmony that stretched beyond the boundaries of their own bodies.

In the prologue, I explained the gradual and subtle process in which history is re-written to fit a country's present self-image. As a result, many rich-country people recommend free-trade, free-market policies in the honest belief that these are policies that thier own ancestors used in order to make their countries rich. When the poor countries protest that those policies hurt, those protests are dismissed as being intellectually misguided or as serving the interests of their corrupt leaders. It never occurs to those Bad Samaritans that the policies they recommend are fundamentally at odds with what history teaches us to be the best development policies. The intention behind their policy recommendations may be honourable, but their effects are no less harmful than those from policy recommendations motivated by deliberate ladder-kicking.

In traditional forms of the doctrine of original sin, human beings are said to have inherited two moral liabilities from their first ancestors, Adam and Eve. One is guilt: we are said to share in the guilt of the first sin that our ancestors committed. The other is corruption, a perversion of motivation that is itself evil and makes people likelier to do wrong deeds.

But it is worth recalling the almost genocidal class hatreds of many leading liberal-left intellectuals, because they show that the motives of a part of the intelligentsia were anything but honourable. They did not want the welfare state to reward their fellow citizens for what they and their ancestors had suffered. They wanted the welfare state to transform them from brutes into men or women whose company Virginia Woolf could tolerate.

It struck Hsing suddenly that Masada didn't even understand the nature of his own genius. To him the patterns of thought and motive that he sensed in the virus were self-explanatory, and those who could not see them were simply not looking hard enough. Yet he would readily admit to his own inability to analyze more human contact, even on the most basic level. That was part and parcel of being iru. What a strange combination of skills and flaws. What an utterly alien profile. Praise the founders of Guera for having taught them all to nurture such specialized talent, rather than seeking to "cure" it. It was little wonder that most innovations in technology now came from the Gueran colonies, and that Earth, who set such a strict standard of psychological "normalcy," now produced little that was truly exciting. Thank God their own ancestors had left that doomed planet before they, too, had lost the genes of wild genius. Thank God they had seen the creative holocaust coming, and escaped it.

Despite shared language, ethnicity, and culture, alliances nurtured deep, long-standing hostilities toward one another, the original source of which was often unknown. They had always been enemies, and so they remained enemies. Indeed, hostility between alliances defined the natives’ lives. If covered by a glass roof, the valley would’ve been a terrarium of human conflict, an ecosystem fueled by sunshine, river water, pigs, sweet potatoes, and war among neighbors. Their ancestors told them that waging war was a moral obligation and a necessity of life. Men said, “If there is no war, we will die.” War’s permanence was even part of the language. If a man said “our war,” he structured the phrase the same way he’d describe an irrevocable fact. If he spoke of a possession such as “our wood,” he used different parts of speech. The meaning was clear: ownership of wood might change, but wars were forever. When compared with the causes of World War II, the motives underlying native wars were difficult for outsiders to grasp. They didn’t fight for land, wealth, or power. Neither side sought to repel or conquer a foreign people, to protect a way of life, or to change their enemies’ beliefs, which both sides already shared. Neither side considered war a necessary evil, a failure of diplomacy, or an interruption of a desired peace. Peace wasn’t waiting on the far side of war. There was no far side. War moved through different phases in the valley. It ebbed and flowed. But it never ended. A lifetime of war was an inheritance every child could count on.

For the psychologist Paul Bloom, this is a huge downside. Empathy, he argues, focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale.62 As Bertrand Russell is often reported to have said, “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep,”63 but few of us are capable of truly feeling statistics in this way. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good. And yet the incentives to show empathy and spontaneous compassion are overwhelming. Think about it: Which kind of people are likely to make better friends, coworkers, and spouses—“calculators” who manage their generosity with a spreadsheet, or “emoters” who simply can’t help being moved to help people right in front of them? Sensing that emoters, rather than calculators, are generally preferred as allies, our brains are keen to advertise that we are emoters. Spontaneous generosity may not be the most effective way to improve human welfare on a global scale, but it’s effective where our ancestors needed it to be: at finding mates and building a strong network of allies.

Most women seek some kind of emotional connection or emotional involvement with a man before consenting to sex. From an evolutionary perspective, this is emotional wisdom women have inherited from their successful maternal ancestors. A man’s emotional involvement, particularly his genuine love, provides a powerful signal that he will stick with her through thick and thin, through health and sickness. Love provides the best chance that he will devote his commitment, provisions, and protection to one woman and her children. Men not in love feel freer to flit from woman to woman.

Most chemicals that give humans a buzz evolved to disrupt insect nervous systems. If our brains used different chemicals, we would not be so vulnerable. However, we have common ancestors with insects. It was long ago, about 500 million years ago, when our ancestors split off from the arthropod lines that became modern insects. However, our neurochemicals remain about the same as theirs. Fortunately, most plant neurotoxins don’t kill us. We have evolved to eat plants, and we are much larger than insects, so low doses are not fatal. But drugs can hijack our motivation mechanisms and take control of our lives.

Go back to where you came from," muttered a man in Italian, glancing from Magnus's Indonesian to Shinyun's Korean face. He moved to shove past them, but Shinyun held up a hand. The man froze. "I've always wondered what that saying is about," Magnus said casually. "I wasn't born in Italy, but many people are who don't fit your idea of what people born here look like. Is it that you think their parents weren't from here, or their grandparents? Why do people say it? Is the idea that everyone should go back to the very first place their ancestors came from?" Shinyun stepped up to the man, who remained fixed in place, his eyeballs twitching. "Wouldn't that mean," Magnus asked, "that ultimately, we all have to go back to the water?" Shinyun flicked a finger, and the man was flung with a brief squeak into the Tiber. Magnus made sure he fell without injury and drifted him to the riverside. The man climbed out and sat down on the bank with a squelch. Magnus hoped he would think about his choices. "I was only going to make him think I would drop him in the water," Magnus clarified. "I understand the impulse, but just making him afraid of us . . ." He trailed off and sighed. "Fear isn't a very efficient motivator." "Fear is all some people understand," Shinyun said. They were standing close together. Magnus could feel the tension running through Shinyun's body. He took her hand and gave it a brief, friendly squeeze before he dropped it. He felt a faint pressure of her fingers in return, as if she'd wanted to squeeze back. I did this to her, he thought, as he always did, the five small words that circled in his mind repeatedly when he was around Shinyun. "I prefer to believe that people can understand a lot, when offered the opportunity," said Magnus. "I like your enthusiasm, but let's not drown anyone." "Spoilsport," said Shinyun, but her tone was friendly.

...The same folks who believe this fantasy also believe that the sole motivation for modern man's practice of science is to disprove their beliefs. How despicably arrogant of them to circumvent their burden of proof! It is plainly there for all to see that science wishes to discover and prove the answers to the very same questions that religion claims to already have answers for, whether or not they disprove former assumptions by our ancestors. The religionists should be happy that that their claims might have the chance to be proven wrong, but instead they would rather fear them disproven. I don't know about you, but I smell a guilty conscience. If they were one-hundred percent certain that their claims were of truth, they wouldn't need "faith" in them, nor would they have to dread possible invalidation.

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive.

They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work. But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed twice? Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? 'Without the whip the Negro will not work,' said the anti- abolitionist. 'Free from their master's supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated,' said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The liberated peasant of 1792 ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his ancestor so, the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers; and the Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There, where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to the slaves them- selves, they know what it is worth, as they know its motive.

Egalitarianism among foragers is concerned primarily with preventing a single individual or coalition from dominating (and thereby making life miserable for) the rest of the group. This leads foragers to be vigilant for early warning signs of people who position themselves above others. This includes dominating or bullying individuals (outside the household ot immediate family), bragging, seeking authority too eagerly, ganging up with other members of the group, and otherwise attempting to control others' behavior. Foragers would readily support the motto fo the early American general Christopher Gadsden: "Don't tread on me." Many of the norms that were common among our forager ancestors are by now deeply embedded in human nature. But these aren't our only norms. Most societies also teach their children norms specific to their society. This ability of societies to adopt different norms is part of what has let humans spread across the Earth, by adopting norms better suited to each local environment. This "cultural flexibility" also enabled our ancestors to implement the huge behavior changes required to turn hunters and gatherers into farmers and herders, roughly 10,000 years ago. Farmers have norms supporting marriage, war, and property, as well as rough treatment of animals, lower classes, and slaves. To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.

THE ORIGIN OF INTELLIGENCE Many theories have been proposed as to why humans developed greater intelligence, going all the way back to Charles Darwin. According to one theory, the evolution of the human brain probably took place in stages, with the earliest phase initiated by climate change in Africa. As the weather cooled, the forests began to recede, forcing our ancestors onto the open plains and savannahs, where they were exposed to predators and the elements. To survive in this new, hostile environment, they were forced to hunt and walk upright, which freed up their hands and opposable thumbs to use tools. This in turn put a premium on a larger brain to coordinate tool making. According to this theory, ancient man did not simply make tools—“tools made man.” Our ancestors did not suddenly pick up tools and become intelligent. It was the other way around. Those humans who picked up tools could survive in the grasslands, while those who did not gradually died off. The humans who then survived and thrived in the grasslands were those who, through mutations, became increasingly adept at tool making, which required an increasingly larger brain. Another theory places a premium on our social, collective nature. Humans can easily coordinate the behavior of over a hundred other individuals involved in hunting, farming, warring, and building, groups that are much larger than those found in other primates, which gave humans an advantage over other animals. It takes a larger brain, according to this theory, to be able to assess and control the behavior of so many individuals. (The flip side of this theory is that it took a larger brain to scheme, plot, deceive, and manipulate other intelligent beings in your tribe. Individuals who could understand the motives of others and then exploit them would have an advantage over those who could not. This is the Machiavellian theory of intelligence.) Another theory maintains that the development of language, which came later, helped accelerate the rise of intelligence. With language comes abstract thought and the ability to plan, organize society, create maps, etc. Humans have an extensive vocabulary unmatched by any other animal, with words numbering in the tens of thousands for an average person. With language, humans could coordinate and focus the activities of scores of individuals, as well as manipulate abstract concepts and ideas. Language meant you could manage teams of people on a hunt, which is a great advantage when pursuing the woolly mammoth. It meant you could tell others where game was plentiful or where danger lurked. Yet another theory is “sexual selection,” the idea that females prefer to mate with intelligent males. In the animal kingdom, such as in a wolf pack, the alpha male holds the pack together by brute force. Any challenger to the alpha male has to be soundly beaten back by tooth and claw. But millions of years ago, as humans became gradually more intelligent, strength alone could not keep the tribe together.

So why do so many of us feel such despair about the direction we’re heading?” asked Ella. “Because hope and optimism doesn’t sell nearly as well as pessimism and despair. Your news outlets earn clicks and viewership by sowing alarmism and division. Your social media plays to addictions and creates unprecedented social pressures. You’re wired by evolution to find bad news more motivational than good. To seek it out. “If your ancestors heard the rustle of a friendly breeze far away in the tall grass, and ran away, mistaking the breeze for a lion, this cost them very little. But if they heard the rustle of a lion in the tall grass, and mistook it for a friendly breeze, this would cost them their lives. Seeing potential bad news behind every harmless breeze is a survival instinct. “There are many other psychological and evolutionary reasons to account for the state of your discontent in the face of prosperity, but I’ll stop there.

Evolved to Run Walking long distances is fundamental to being a hunter-gatherer, but people sometimes have to run. One powerful motivation is to sprint to a tree or some other refuge when being chased by a predator. Although you only have to run faster than the next fellow when a lion chases you, bipedal humans are comparatively slow. The world’s fastest humans can run at 37 kilometers (23 miles) per hour for about ten to twenty seconds, whereas an average lion can run at least twice as fast for approximately four minutes. Like us, early Homo must have been pathetic sprinters whose terrified dashes were too often ineffective. However, there is plentiful evidence that by the time of H. erectus our ancestors had evolved exceptional abilities to run long distances at moderate speeds in hot conditions. The adaptations underlying these abilities helped transform the human body in crucial ways and explain why humans, even amateur athletes, are among the best long-distance runners in the mammalian world. Today, humans run long distances to stay fit, commute, or just have fun, but the struggle to get meat underlies the origins of endurance running. To appreciate this inference, try to imagine what it was like for the first humans to hunt or scavenge 2 million years ago. Most carnivores kill using a combination of speed and strength. Large predators, such as lions and leopards, either chase or pounce on their prey and then dispatch it with lethal force. These dangerous carnivores can run as fast as 70 kilometers (43 miles) per hour, and they have terrifying natural weapons: daggerlike fangs, razor-sharp claws, and heavy paws to help them maim and kill. Hunters

Children are often our ancestors coming back through us.

Her voice carried the voices of a hundred thousand souls in it; a whole history of resistance and rage moved with her.” ― Daniel José Older, Shadowshaper

Flagrant disregard for the complexities of human motivation has led us to credit our ancestors with godlike omniscience. This, in turn, has forced us to invent devious plots or to question the moral fiber of these people in order to explain why they did not act on their all-encompassing knowledge and behave as we think they should have.

WHEN YOU FOLLOW THE WAYS OF YOUR ANCESTORS YOU WILL NEVER BE LOST. LET YOUR ANCESTORS BE YOUR GUIDING LIGHT.

One who lives by eating roots from unploughed fields, and fruits that have fallen on the ground, who always resides in forests, who daily performs the worship of the departed ancestors, such a Brahmin is known as a Rishi.

I embrace and celebrate the color of my skin. Why should I reject the skin color that reflects the work my ancestors did tending to their harvests, creating homes for their families and protecting their lands?

This could come as disheartening news to ecological campaigners who believe that positive and optimistic messages of a better future are far more effective than visions of apocalypse in rousing people to action. While that may be true for motivating action among the general public, it is less obviously the case for the privileged and powerful, who are more likely to respond to crisis and even fear. The chances are that they will only take radical action if they feel they have something to lose.

Grief is the persistence of love,” Krawec writes. Indeed. Grief and love are not bound by time and space. In Indigenous worlds, Land Defenders act out of necessity and survival, protecting rivers and landscapes from destruction. They do so out of mourning for a world taken from them through centuries of colonialism. But they also do so out of love and solidarity for life that currently exists and life that has yet to be created on this planet. They are ancestors of the future, motivated by grief as the persistence of love. Grief is also about remembering, or unforgetting, the future and a history that could have been.

Because hope and optimism doesn’t sell nearly as well as pessimism and despair. Your news outlets earn clicks and viewership by sowing alarmism and division. Your social media plays to addictions and creates unprecedented social pressures. You’re wired by evolution to find bad news more motivational than good. To seek it out. “If your ancestors heard the rustle of a friendly breeze far away in the tall grass, and ran away, mistaking the breeze for a lion, this cost them very little. But if they heard the rustle of a lion in the tall grass, and mistook it for a friendly breeze, this would cost them their lives. Seeing potential bad news behind every harmless breeze is a survival instinct.

The International Date Line is the beginning in Eden, the place where God taught our common ancestor to count the days with the week.

Seeing their parents' struggles, Asian American children tend to feel very obligated and motivated to live up to their parents' expectations. I think that's also why Asian American second-generation Christians can be so fervent in their faith. They understand God's sacrifice in deep, personal ways because they have family models of this self-giving.

Three Survival Strategies Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, our ancestors developed three fundamental strategies for survival: Creating separations—in order to form boundaries between themselves and the world, and between one mental state and another Maintaining stability—in order to keep physical and mental systems in a healthy balance Approaching opportunities and avoiding threats—in order to gain things that promote offspring, and escape or resist things that don’t These strategies have been extraordinarily effective for survival. But Mother Nature doesn’t care how they feel. To motivate animals, including ourselves, to follow these strategies and pass on their genes, neural networks evolved to create pain and distress under certain conditions: when separations break down, stability is shaken, opportunities disappoint, and threats loom. Unfortunately, these conditions happen all the time, because: Everything is connected. Everything keeps changing. Opportunities routinely remain unfulfilled or lose their luster, and many threats are inescapable (e.g., aging and death)

Here’s the thing: many organizations are deactivating the part of employees’ brains called the seeking system. 3 Our seeking systems create the natural impulse to explore our worlds, learn about our environments, and extract meaning from our circumstances. 4 When we follow the urges of our seeking system, it releases dopamine—a neurotransmitter linked to motivation and pleasure—that makes us want to explore more. 5 The seeking system is the part of the brain that encouraged our ancestors to explore beyond Africa. And that pushes us to pursue hobbies until the crack of dawn and seek out new skills and ideas just because they interest us. The seeking system is why animals in captivity prefer to search for their food rather than have it delivered to them. 6 When our seeking system is activated, we feel more motivated, purposeful, and zestful. We feel more alive. 7 Exploring, experimenting, learning: this is the way we’re designed to live. And work, too. The problem is that our organizations weren’t designed to take advantage of people’s seeking systems. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution—when modern management was conceived—organizations were purposely designed to suppress our natural impulses to learn and explore.

Just as the fear system helped our ancestors survive, it is easy to see why an emotional system that motivates exploration and learning would support survival. Across the ages, nature did not always provide the necessary resources for survival. The seeking system is the motivational engine that each day gets mammals to venture out into the world, even though they don’t know what they’ll find.9 On average, mammals whose brains motivated them to explore and learn about their environment were more likely to survive and have children.

The point is," Ziller said, "that having carefully constructed their paradise from first principles to remove all credible motives for conflict amongst themselves and all natural threats—" He paused and glanced sourly at the sunlight flaring off the gilt border of his seat. "—Well, almost all natural threats, these people then find their lives are so hollow they have to recreate false versions of just the sort of terrors untold generations of their ancestors spent their existences attempting to conquer." "I think that is a little like criticizing somebody for owning both an umbrella and a shower," Kabe said. "It is the choice that is important." [...] "These people control their terrors. They can choose to sample them, repeat them or avoid them. That is not the same as living beneath a volcano when you've just invented the wheel, or wondering whether your levee will break and drown your entire village. Again, this applies to all societies which have matured beyond the age of barbarism. There is no great mystery here." [...] "I think it is only natural, a sign that one has succeeded as a species, that what used to have to be suffered as a necessity becomes enjoyed as sport. Even fear can be recreational.

its current form. Yet, all is not lost. The experience of being fully American has also motivated large segments of millennials to embrace religious practices that their recent ancestors rejected out of fear, thinking that such practices would prevent them from becoming fully American.

Besides, from the former actions of our city they [Persians] had conceived a particular opinion of her: they thought that if they attacked another city first, they would be at war with it and Athens as well, for she would be zealous in coming to succor her injured neighbors; but if they made their way here first, no Greeks elsewhere would dare attempt the deliverance of others, and for their sake incur the open hostility of the foreigners. These, then, were the motives of the foe. But our ancestors, without stopping to calculate the hazards of the war, but holding that a glorious death leaves behind it a deathless account of deeds well done, had no fear of the multitude of their adversaries, but rather had confidence in their own valor. And feeling ashamed that the barbarians were in their country, they did not wait till their allies should be informed and come to their support; rather than have to thank others for their salvation, they chose that the rest of the Greeks should have to thank them. (Funeral Oration section 22-23)