Freedom isn't good for you.

Hey folks, I've been wanting to make this small little cartoon for a while now. I kinda rushed it a bit so don't judge me on my drawing skills.

The purpose of this cartoon is to show that the human desire for more freedom is nothing more than a product of our evolutionary past. The first two rows aren't controversial at all; we all know that our bodies have evolved to naturally crave high energy sugar and to minimize physical labor. And we know this is a problem because a recent explosion in technology has placed our primitive bodies in an environment where we have unlimited snack food, and a sedentary lifestyle.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to connect the dots a bit further. I think early humans evolved with a biological urge to maximize choice. 10,000 years ago the choice to have another home, meal or piece of clothing would have been a huge evolutionary advantage. Now humans are placed in an environment where there is almost unlimited opportunity (career wise, clothing wise, travel wise etc) which I suspect is ironically a huge source of anxiety for us since choosing one path is closing the door on all the others. In western countries (and especially in America), freedom is value that we continue to strive blindly towards, yet I suspect our biology is misleading us. I think we'd be on the whole happier if we had less freedom, and instead one very well defined path for our lives.

I'll even go one step further and suspect that depression (which is a super complicated condition correlated with hundreds of variables) is mainly caused by having a lifestyle which is sufficiently different from the lifestyle our caveman brains expect us to be living.