How domesticated will we become?

Some is actually important for society to function, but diminishing returns are real, and we don't know the line

Wild wolf vs domesticated dog

I’m not the first person to ask the question of how domesticated we will become. But I don’t think enough of us spend time thinking about it. It’s a topic that’s fairly invisible in modern times because we’re actually trained out of paying attention to such things, but it’s increasingly relevant. Maybe today I can get you to more actively consider it.

Everyone is domesticated now. We do not forage, do not hunt, most of us do not even build or could repair the tools and tech we depend on. We are comfortable. Some amount of this is not bad. Comfort is important and it’s good most people are freed from needing to spear their dinner every night or grow their own crops. But we rarely ask what is lost in the process, or if there is a point at which too much comfort begins to strip away something essential. We just continue this process without asking too many questions, and that’s not good.

The term “domesticated” is usually reserved for animals. But it fits us too (we are also animals, after all). A domesticated animal is one that has had its instincts dulled, its needs met externally, its survival outsourced. That sounds familiar.

Technology is a good example to start with, since most of you have seen this progress in your own lifetime. We’ve gone from swapping out parts and upgrading computers to sealed devices, with smartphones and tablets replacing desktop workstations for many. As our tools become more advanced and miniaturized, we understand them less. If you can’t repair or even grasp the machine, you’re fairly helpless. If you can’t build even a crude version, your dependence is total. You are the user, not the maker. And eventually, the user forgets how things work. Gamers in the ’90s were more tech literate than many professionals working in that industry today. We’re clearly losing agency on this. No wonder time spent on phones correlates with unhappiness, something that’s not true of creator devices.

Creativity is the same. If your entire expressive life is filtered through algorithms, if your cultural diet is entirely passive, your sense of self becomes derivative. The painter who does not paint and only prompts art. The music lover who only curates playlists of others but never composes a song. The film buff that only watches and comments, but never at least wrote a screenplay Hollywood ignored or even made an original YouTube video. It’s a bleak state when most people are pure consumers about most things and creation becomes an anachronism. Humans become mere pets entertained by bright screens. There’s already research here if you use AI too much, your creative muscle will atrophy. Like a domesticated animal, skills we don’t use fade away.

In how we eat, we have replaced instinct with guidelines, influenced by large food conglomerates that don’t have your health interest at heart. Humans once ate what they could catch, grow, or gather. People now require studies to tell them sugar and seed oils are bad but really most of what’s bad can be known from first principles (eat single-ingredient foods, it’s actually very simple). The irony is that domesticating animals brought us closer to nature than any drive-thru ever could, but we don’t understand diminishing returns, and so we optimize for what tastes good and not what’s nutritious (this is another example of the plague of over-optimization).

The mental health industry and big pharma is basically an entire industrial complex meant to chemically domesticate us. Some of it might be useful, at least temporarily. But make no mistake you are dulling your senses, changing your behavior and altering your neurochemistry to an unnatural state. That has repercussions, as there are no free neurochemical lunches and everything has tradeoffs that no one really talks about. Dependence is real, too (domestication and dependence are closely related). Psychedelics are in many ways the antithesis.

In the case of your home, you probably purchased it or paid someone to build it for you. The cooperation of others here is important. Not living in a cave is great and creature comforts here let us flourish. Americans specifically benefit greatly from air conditioning, something our European and UK friends wish they had more of. But once your home is built, if you can’t care for it yourself or maintain your own grounds, you’ve probably become too docile. You’re ill prepared for any real survival situation, or just fully removed from the very human experience of tilling your land and maintaining your tools. That’s a terrible place to be, fully reliant on outsourced help for even basic tasks. Very wealthy people live like this, and many of them are far less fulfilled.

Even family, if you’ve opted out entirely, if you have no intention of passing anything on, you are closer to a well-kept zoo exhibit than an epochal human being in a generational chain. Our current society says we shouldn’t have shame about this, (some say we should) but regardless of how you feel here it deserves to be said plainly. You can have the best life possible without children, but if the species as a whole adopted your approach, we would end. I talked about that you might even be demoralized if your choice is to not have kids the other week, which is another byproduct of too much domestication. A caged otter in a zoo alone with lots of toys is far less happy that one in the wild with a mate and offspring. It likely won’t even live as long.

Speaking of kids, they’re another good example of domestication gone wrong. Parents in recent times have over-domesticate their own children by keeping them in padded rooms and safe. But it turns out, that’s the worst possible way to raise them, and research continues to show that kids need free, wild play to develop appropriately. Not to sit inside on devices. This has led to the least flourishing generation we know of. Again, too much domestication, not enough freedom. It couldn’t be worse for us, a species with complex social needs we evolved for.

You can think of more examples, and you should as you go about your life. If you do this, you can start to very consciously understand when you’re being domesticated (and nudged by the state, large corporations, even your peers). Some of it you might be fine with. The problem is when it spreads invisibly, when an ever-increasingly domesticated life becomes the only life imaginable. That is where agency dies.

Nietzsche once wrote, “he who cannot obey himself will be commanded.” And that is the real issue. A domesticated person is one who no longer gives orders to themselves, but waits for instructions. What to eat. What to say. What to think and want. Do you really want to live like that? Eventually if you did, the worst people who want the most control would have their way, and you’d end up living a pod and eating bugs (or some equivalent).

There is still wildness in us. It shows up in youth that haven’t been programmed too much, in flow experiences of creativity, in the moments we disobey bad orders or even when we just act in a way that’s authentic and ourselves. We are social creatures that follow laws and behave civically, of course. But the tension between the individual and the collective is where the real human lives. And the more we forget that and let modern domestication drive all our actions without a second thought, the more housebroken we become and over-determined our lives are.