How To Be An Animal
Recalibrate Approach & Avoid
Sweet, colorful fruit is a costly signal from plants — a metabolic bribe to convince animals to disperse their seeds, conveniently, along with some fertilizer. But the plant didn’t choose to make fruit. Just as the animal didn’t choose to like the taste of sweetness. Over time, plants that made more easily recognizable and sweeter fruit simply outcompeted those that did not. The same was true for animals that consumed fruit — animals that ate organic material high in readily accessible energy outcompeted those that did not, they had more readily convertible energy to deploy in maintaining themselves. Everything that exists in reality is a dissipative structure. To persist is to channel and dissipate energy. In order to continue our metabolism, we must regularly consume energy just like a candle needs wax in order to continue burning. Strangely, even things like rocks — that seem totally inert — are dissipative structures. A rock is a structure formed under conditions that no longer exist — pressure, heat, and geological forces that organized matter into a crystalline lattice. That organization is stored energy. The rock is out of equilibrium with its current environment and every interaction with that environment, in the form of water, wind, thermal cycling, and radiation is slowly moving it, incrementally, towards dissipation. The rock is spending down a budget of stored energy that was invested during its formation. Unlike organisms, the rock has no mechanism to replenish its structure, so it slowly dissipates.
Pleasure evolved as a proxy signal to index increases in dissipative capacity. Organisms felt pleasure in response to behaviors that increased their dissipative capacity, behaviors that added to their structure. Overcoming resistance through the physical challenge of a successful hunt triggered intense pleasure when the predator finally overtook its prey. Organisms that felt strong pleasure signals from sexual reproduction had more children and outcompeted those that did not. For most animals, throughout most of evolutionary time, pleasure was a largely reliable signal that indicated an increase in dissipative capacity. And organisms with greater dissipative capacity relative to their structural maintenance costs tended to outcompete and survive.
But once the pleasure channel existed as a pathway, other organisms evolved to interface with it. With time, some organisms learned to trigger the pleasure response in other creatures in ways that didn’t benefit the organism experiencing the pleasure. Now, the pleasure signal could mean a negative metabolic return. Think of the Venus fly trap. The carnivorous plant produces a sweet nectar. Essentially, this is the same bribe that the fruiting plant was offering: a costly caloric signal that says, “Hey, bub, there’s energy over here.” The unsuspecting insect approaches, because the plant is triggering its evolved approach behavior. The signal is technically accurate: there is energy in the Venus fly trap’s nectar. So the signal isn’t even strictly decoupled from what the fly evolved to seek. The nectar does provide calories. The negative metabolic return doesn’t come from the signal being false. It comes from what the organism experiencing the pleasure doesn’t detect: the structural cost behind the accurate signal. The fly’s evaluation correctly identifies the energy, but has no mechanism to evaluate the trap. The plant uses the insect’s evolved approach behavior in order to trick its prey into coming close enough to be consumed. The result is net energy gain for the plant — and dissipation for the structure of the fly.
Our current social and cultural environment is completely confused about this. We understand, through B.F. Skinner, how operant conditioning works. We can use stimulus and response in order to reinforce behaviors. Every successful behavioral modification regime, from CBT to Alcoholics Anonymous, leverages these tools. What we do not understand is that what we call “addiction” isn’t a special category of behavior. It’s the general case of pleasure that has been decoupled from behavior that produces more dissipative capacity. Addiction versus what we think of as “normal” pleasure consumption, varies only by degree. Whenever we consume the signal of pleasure without a structural return (that is, an increase in our ability to capture more energy), we are experiencing our own dissipation. In an environment where the consumption of the pleasure response itself has been normalized as healthy or even “living the good life” — the cognition of the evaluator has been captured. The evaluator that would detect capture is the same system that has been captured by the pleasure signal that is dissipating it.
What this means is that most of what we consider “normal behavior” is an inverted signal. Our approach behavior — what we move toward — is calibrated to pleasure that has been decoupled from what actually makes us stronger and more capable. And this decoupling of pleasure from structural integrity didn’t happen randomly. Engineered, highly palatable food. Passive, endlessly entertaining entertainment. Targeted sexual signaling. Boundless product catalogs that offer comfort and appearance of actual capacity (through the projection of signals). Socializing, dining, drinking and interactions with others that build nothing… In each and every case our approach behavior is triggered by a signal that evolved to suggest a positive return on investment for our energy. And just like the Venus fly trap, there often is a real energy return. But in each case it is bundled with a structural trap. McDonald’s isn’t lying. There are calories in the Happy Meal. The exploitation of the pleasure signal exists in what is not being indexed: the behavioral subscription. The reinforcement loop. The long-term structural cost hidden behind the accurate short-term signal. The lost capacity to do without the quick fix and the intense pleasure of consuming the stimulus.
And it isn’t just our approach behavior that has been inverted. The natural seductiveness of all of these pleasures has wreaked havoc on our cognition by feeling too good, too easily. This trains us iteratively to avoid the exact behaviors that caused us pleasure throughout our long biological history: the structural work that actually increases our dissipative capacity. We now approach what dissipates us and avoid what builds us. And this isn’t a character flaw. It’s operant conditioning. We are Pavlov’s dog. We are rats in a lab. A lifetime of exposure to engineered environments that interface with our pleasure has trained us to view pleasure decoupled from production as a normal baseline. The work that would actually build us up now registers as something to be endured, and then compensated for with a treat. When we tell ourselves, “I’ll finish this difficult task and then reward myself,” we are actually deepening our own entrapment. The pleasure response evolved in order to tell us where a positive energy return exists. When we use the techniques of behavioral reinforcement in order to incentivize difficult work that actually gives us more energy — power — we are breaking our own naturally reinforcing feedback loop. The work that makes you more powerful is already its own reward. Any time you “reward” yourself with something that triggers pleasure without production, you are destroying your own dissipative capacity and the naturally self-reinforcing accumulation of power. But you’ll say, “I worked hard. I want it. This makes sense. I deserve it. It’s good for me.” And these are, the escalating defense layers, of your captured cognition. The service economy tricks us by performing a status inversion: we think the clientele is high status and the service provider is low. But it is the client who passively experiences the pleasure that is dissipating, while the service provider is the one who actually gains in energy.
It was language that decoupled pleasure from what builds us. And the cost of deception plus verification being less than the cost of production, made the trajectory thermodynamically favored. Language is the mechanism that allows us to generate narrative cover for the decoupled consumption of signal. Language allows us to manufacture convincing stories about “self-care,” or “healing.” Without language, the proxy can only decouple through direct conditioning. With language, we can produce elaborate, uncheckable justifications in real time, indefinitely. Language gave the captured evaluator propaganda that sounds like reason. The Devil only ever sold one thing: decoupled signal.
And the social environment is an active delivery mechanism for decoupled pleasure signaling. Your friends’, coworkers’, and families’ own normalized pleasure consumption loops actively create ongoing pressure for you to continue your own behavioral conditioning. And none of this is random. The economy — and frequently even our most cherished relationships — are simply other organisms that have learned how to probe and manipulate our approach behavior, by triggering the pleasure response.
How can you determine if something is actually good for you then? The test is simple: did the pleasure occur as you gained in dissipative capacity? Did you come out stronger, richer, or more capable? Not, did it feel good, but can you point to something tangible that was built? If not, the source of the pleasure is parasitic. It is consuming you. Often, with incomprehensibly effective camouflage, that has effectively disabled your immune response, just like the parasite disables the immunological response of a host.
We have been seduced into believing that both people and things that are consuming us are what make us safe and healthy.
When we experience discomfort as we move against the energy gradient — that is, when we expend energy to lift ourselves out of the low energy channel — for example, during hard, productive work… The discomfort we feel isn’t a feature of the work. It’s the experience of withdrawal. We are experiencing symptoms that stem from our discontinuation of a lower-effort state. This is actual withdrawal. This isn’t a metaphor to addiction. Discomfort during hard work is a withdrawal signal from lower effort behavior. And just like the addict kicking a drug habit, the experience and intensity of our discomfort is temporary, as the prediction error in our cognition recalibrates once the old signal, which was driven by our expectations, is extinguished through iterative behavioral conditioning. This is why — if you want freedom — discomfort is the goal.
Reduce the effectiveness of external signaling that competes with target behavior. Strengthen the internal signaling that supports it. Hold that configuration for long enough, and you recalibrate. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. This works for quitting heroin, installing toilets, starting a writing habit, quitting a bad relationship, or cutting empty socializing. Same mechanism. Same intervention. Whenever you successfully fight thermodynamic drift towards the lower-effort channel and feel something like: “I don’t like this” or “this is intolerable” that is the data coming through, telling you that the reconditioning is working. No discomfort, means there is no delta. Which means no recalibration is occurring. Suffering through behavior change is the internal experience of your system updating. Once it stops hurting, reprogramming is complete. So the “self-discipline” project is twofold: you are adding a control layer, but you are also removing decoupled signal sources while you persist towards recalibration. You are carving a new channel.
The perfect amount of pleasure — is the precise measure of pleasure — that arrives as a byproduct of structural return. Pleasure that builds you is a receipt, not a target. Relationships are net positive only when coordination surplus exceeds their maintenance cost. And that threshold scales with individual capacity. As you become more competent the break-even threshold rises with your capability so that most candidates for relationship will fall below the threshold where you can even theoretically break even on the exchange. If you are already highly capable on your own, the surplus someone else needs to provide in order to clear the maintenance cost of the relationship is higher. On the flip side, a person with low capacity benefits from almost any cooperative relationship — nearly anyone adds something they cannot do alone. A person with high solo capacity already handles most things, so most people add less coordination value for them than they cost to maintain. That’s why, as you become higher-capacity, you’ll naturally have fewer relationships, especially those where you are not in some hierarchical role, like teacher or leader. This isn’t a dysfunction — it’s math.
When we talk about willpower we are actually talking about reshaping our internal signaling environment. We create linguistic signals in our heads that reshape our perception of the energy landscape. When you force yourself to do whatever hard thing you’ve decided on, to actually build energy, instead of indulging in an easy social fix or fast food, or whatever your preferred low energy channel is — all those behavioral tracks are firing while you’re saying: “No. Keep doing this other stuff that you ‘dislike.’” That internal voice is a real signal, competing with the other signals in your environment. It’s not a ghost outside the system pulling levers. Willpower is not some transcendent controller overriding the machine. It’s a competing signal in a signaling landscape. And it costs energy to maintain. Which is why we only have so much of it. It’s a real metabolic process, not a mystical resource.
To escape the trap, you have to give up both the carrot and the stick. The only pleasure you accept becomes the pleasure that falls into your lap as a consequence of your actions to increase your dissipative capacity. No more carrot. You just forget about pleasure entirely. No more, “do X difficult thing and then you can do Y fun thing.” But also: no more stick. The stick implies punishment as motivator. Now there is only the work of living. The carrot and stick framework assumes you need decoupled incentives in order to act. But the recalibration towards the animal state is to make the process of living itself become the sole generator of pleasure that you will accept. You do not reward yourself for installing your new toilet. The installed toilet is the reward — and eventually your system will register it that way. Whenever you think: “I’ll do the hard thing then treat myself” you are actually maintaining the captured state. Every “treat” reinforces the idea that building is something to be endured, instead of the point of satisfaction. When we treat ourselves, we are re-anchoring our cognition to the decoupled signal of pleasure. Recalibration means locking your approach behavior onto structural return and locking your avoid behavior onto anything that is attempting to interface with your pleasure that isn’t making you demonstrably more powerful.
And none of this is really an inversion. What we think of as “normal” is the inversion. We evolved to approach structural return. That is why the pleasure signal evolved in the first place. Pleasure told us where to go. We only need to do this work to reprogram ourselves because we live in an environment that is predatory towards us. Modern life parasitizes our approach and avoid behavior. A lifetime of engineered, decoupled signal has made our default orientation untrustworthy. What we experience as “recalibration” is more accurately restoration. Everyone’s preferences are addictions. Most people’s approach behavior has been wired towards things they would be better off avoiding. While at the same time, their avoid behavior is wired away from the structural work that would actually build their capacity. The entire orientation is inverted, for almost everyone, maintained by an engineered signal environment that profits from keeping it that way. Culture isn’t neutral. It’s addiction delivery infrastructure that we currently call “normal life.”
There’s not some fine line where behavior transitions from normal to addiction. The mechanism is identical across a spectrum — behavior reinforced by metabolic reward, progressively capturing decision-making architecture. “Addiction” is simply a label we apply when the optimization target has drifted far enough from some reference (like health, autonomy, or social function) that an observer can uncontroversially label it as pathological.
When we get through the withdrawal phase, eventually the energy landscape shifts. The discomfort is transition cost, not operating cost. The work stops costing willpower. It becomes the thing you seek. Right now, every move away from the easy channel requires some internal competition to overcome the feedback loop. After recalibration, you expect the work, and not the treat. The delta between them disappears. You just do the thing. And the energy you are currently spending on the internal competition is freed up to be reinvested in creating even more capacity to channel and dissipate energy. And the things that used to feel like “treats” start feeling like what they always were: interruptions. The stop at McDonald’s and scroll on social media don’t feel like relief anymore. They feel like a detour from whatever you were actually doing. Your recalibrated system experiences the decoupled signal of pleasure as parasitic and not a reward. Post transformation there is less internal friction, more available energy, and you immediately recognize pleasure traps when you see them. And in case you think this all sounds too totalizing. Relax, Epictetus. You’re not so much resisting temptation as you are seeing the mechanism. You’re not white-knuckling past your old so-called preferences. Instead, you see whose energy channels they were always feeding. You start to recognize your distended abdomen not as a record of giving in to the pleasure of eating, but the biological substrate of the parasite that has been feeding on you.
Animals do not have this problem. It’s true, they can be seduced by predatory signals like the Venus fly trap. But without language, the surface area for deception that parasitizes their approach and avoid response is vastly reduced. Language gave us the gift — and prison — of abstraction. It is not only the external environment that seduces us. We do it to ourselves. Our own interior monologue reshapes the world. We forget which way is up and which is down. We prioritize sweetness, but cannot perceive the trap. To be human, is to be deceived.
I am not giving you a list of do’s and don’t’s. The system I am suggesting has only one rule, with the goal of rewiring your orientation to approach and avoid.
You can do anything you want — except avoid pain or seek pleasure as an end in itself. This is the rule.
This is the diagnosis. Pleasure for its own sake is a trap. It is the surface area for your extraction. Pain avoidance as an end in itself, is how the trap maintains its grip.
It’s not a list of things to quit. It’s a reorientation of our approach and avoid axis. You can eat McDonald’s — if it’s not because it feels good and not because you’re avoiding the discomfort of hunger or discipline. In practice, almost nothing passes that filter. But structurally, it isn’t restrictive. It’s honest. It seems, from the naive point of view, that “avoid pain” and “seek pleasure” are what we evolved to do. But that instruction set only works when those signals are coupled. These are only the correct instructions in an environment where pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance are reliably indexed to a structural return to our fitness. This is the experience of most animals. The animal following those instructions is following reliable data. For the human, once other organisms — and eventually entire economies — learned how to trigger the pleasure signal without providing a net return on energy, the instruction to “seek pleasure” became synonymous with “walk into traps.” And the instruction to “avoid pain” became synonymous with “stay weak, stuck, and dependent.” Pain avoidance is how the capture maintains itself. Every time you route around discomfort, you’re preserving the parasitic calibration. You never experience withdrawal. “Avoid pain,” in a decoupled environment, is an instruction to never grow. This is the mechanism behind every cognitive bias. Every bias is the system seeking the pleasure of mental comfort or avoiding the pain — and energy cost — of updating. Confirmation bias says: approach information that feels right, avoid information that hurts. The sunk cost fallacy says: avoid the pain of acknowledging loss. Status quo bias says: avoid the discomfort of change. Motivated reasoning says: believe your own confabulation. In-group bias says: approach social pleasure, avoid the pain of standing alone. None of these are reasoning errors. They’re the cognitive experience approach and avoid signaling. We only call them “biases” when we have incontrovertible verification that the evaluator has been captured. But the evaluator is always captured. That is the ground state. The entire catalog of biases and fallacies isn’t a list of separate issues. It’s one: cognition routing towards comfort and away from discomfort. With a voiceover convincing us that we are “doing” something.
On the other side of recalibration is autocatalysis. The bee moves happily from flower to flower and in doing so, furthers its own success. Following its bliss is structural return. The wolf pack, taking down a reindeer, doesn’t need a mindfulness practice to be sure of their orientation.
So here is how to be an animal.
Pleasure is an evolved proxy for structural return.
The proxy has been decoupled from the return.
Stop consuming the decoupled proxy.
Endure the withdrawal.
Make becoming more powerful your sole source of pleasure.
Life goes autocatalytic.