I watched a tiger documentary with Miller a while back.

The mother tiger was doing everything.

Hunting. Raising the cubs. Protecting the cubs. Teaching the cubs how to hunt so that one day they could grow up and presumably do all of this for their own ungrateful tiger children.

The male tiger was mostly elsewhere.

Now, before we judge him too harshly, at one point this absolute unit ran down a full-grown sloth bear. I don't know what the tiger equivalent of contributing around the house is, but taking down a bear has to count for something.

Anyway, Miller watched a tiger documentary.

I apparently began a several-month investigation into the nature of society.

Because recently something reminded me of those tigers, and I made the mistake I often make: I pulled on the thread.

I started reading about other animals.

Elephants live in matriarchal family groups where older females carry much of the knowledge and leadership. Lionesses do most of the hunting in a pride. Chimpanzees have intense male hierarchies full of alliances, competition and what can only be described as office politics without the office. Bonobo females form alliances that give them enormous influence over their groups.

This went on for an unreasonable amount of time.

And somewhere between "How do elephant families work?" and "Apparently chimpanzees are running Succession in the forest," I arrived at a very human question:

What happens when the world an animal was built for changes faster than the animal can?

Because that's us.

Our biology changes slowly.

Our culture changes faster.

And our technology has apparently had three espressos and is sprinting down the street without either of them.

We are living between clocks that don't agree.

For most of human history, being physically strong gave you obvious ways to be useful. Then we invented machines that could lift more, pull more, dig more and move more than any human ever could.

But this isn't just about strength.

Think about the blacksmith. The farmer. The machinist. The typist. The switchboard operator. The factory worker whose hands knew a process so well they barely needed instructions anymore.

Those jobs provided income, obviously.

But they also provided something we don't put on a W-2.

A place.

You knew what you could do. Other people knew what you could do. And somebody needed you to do it.

Then technology changed.

The typist became indispensable and then almost disappeared. The switchboard operator did the same. Machines swallowed entire categories of physical work. Computers swallowed enormous amounts of clerical work.

And now AI has looked at the arrangement and said, "What about the people with master's degrees?"

Technology doesn't wait for us to emotionally process the update.

And that's the part I can't stop chewing on.

Getting rid of the role doesn't get rid of the need the role was feeding.

We still want to be useful.

We want to be good at something.

We want to belong somewhere. We want responsibility. We want status. We want to contribute. We want somebody to look around and say, "I need a person who can do this," and for us to be that person.

Those are very old needs.

The jobs aren't.

The institutions aren't.

The economic system isn't.

LinkedIn definitely isn't.

Maybe some of the chaos we're experiencing comes from confusing the two.

The environment changed, but the animal came with us.

We have ancient wiring trying to operate inside a world that keeps rewriting the instructions.

And then, because apparently this situation wasn't complicated enough, humans added a feature.

We narrate it.

A tiger can lose its place in an environment. It can experience stress. It can change tactics. Move. Compete differently. Find another niche. Or fail to adapt.

What it does not do is turn the whole experience into a referendum on its identity.

The tiger isn't lying awake at 2:17 in the morning thinking:

I used to be good at this.

Everyone else seems to be figuring it out.

Maybe I'm just not enough.

We do that.

We experience the friction and then immediately hire ourselves to explain it.

Why don't I feel useful?

Why isn't this enough?

Why am I unhappy? I did the things.

I got the degree. I got the job. I make decent money. I checked the boxes. Why does something still feel off?

The problem may be real.

Our explanation for the problem may be completely wrong.

Sometimes an old need is being fed by a strategy that stopped working.

And here's where our weird human habit of narrating everything finally becomes useful.

Because we're also the animal that can notice what's happening.

We don't have to get rid of the need to feel useful. We can find another way to be useful.

We don't have to stop wanting belonging. We can reconsider where we look for it.

We don't have to pretend competence, status, contribution and purpose suddenly stopped mattering because somebody told us we're supposed to be more evolved than that.

We can change the strategy without pretending we've changed the animal.

That's the distinction I keep coming back to.

My completely unnecessary tour through the animal kingdom convinced me there isn't one "natural" arrangement we're supposed to return to. Tigers do tiger stuff. Elephants do elephant stuff. Chimps appear to be staging coups. Nature has experimented plenty.

But we don't get to pretend we're separate from nature either.

We're animals who built smartphones.

Animals with mortgages.

Animals with performance reviews and Instagram accounts and artificial intelligence.

Very old creatures living inside very new systems.

So maybe living intentionally requires learning to hold both truths at once.

What does the old wiring actually need?

And:

Does the life I've built still give it a healthy way to get it?

Because our biology isn't keeping up with our technology.

I'm not convinced our culture is keeping up either.

And somewhere between those three things is a very old animal trying to figure out where it fits.

Apparently that's what I got from watching a tiger documentary with a four-year-old.

Miller thought the sloth bear was cool.

He may have understood the assignment better than I did.

— Ricky