Modern ape

by Jacob Mills

I step down from the raised floorboards onto the red earth, another step takes me out of the lounge and into the pouring rain. The tin roof and three tin walls are protecting me from the storm and it’s electrifying to be out in it. The fourth, eastern wall is completely open, it was never built. But out here the wind rarely blows from the east. The aspect perfectly cuts off the powerful southerlies and the hot dusty northerlies, while allowing the sunrise to light my bed after the dawn birdsong has awoken me.

My home is ‘crude’ by ‘someone’s’ standards. But as I sip my coffee and look through the Myall trees and over the saltbush, watching a family of kangaroos pass by, I recognise my privilege and that, of the privileged, I am lucky. And I am happy.

This is now, I didn’t always feel this way. Growing up on food from our garden and paddocks and having the endless fun of life out bush had a dark side. It isolated me socially and made me uncomfortable when the town kids showed off their PlayStations and tuck-shop lunches. I felt like I was an outsider when I went to town, and, in a way, I was. Society was showing twelve-year-old me that TV dinners and video games were coveted and that what I had known was bizarre. Then during my adolescence, nice clothes and loud cars were what was desired.

Once I started to make some money I tried to fill those insecurities. Five-star hotels, nice clothes, expensive dinners, and big TVs. I used to drive a spacious car with chrome everywhere. I used to wax my chest, and my back. I was lost in a pretentious, material world. I got fat. My skin was bad. I was so uncomfortable and becoming miserable.

My stunted emotional capacity couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so I partied harder and bought more shit to impress more strangers. I was opulent, obnoxious, and over dosed. But I knew that something wasn’t right and I’m glad I didn’t buy too hard into that world. I was healthy (pretty much), no debts, no addictions. When I changed direction, from industrial electrician to environmental science student, I was doing something conceptually new to me. I’d acted on my intuition.

I was told by the footy club president that I wouldn’t get the grades. I was told I’d miss the money. I was told by an academic that I was finally doing something hard. Dickheads everywhere, pushing societies agenda on me. But it wasn’t about the grades, even though I got them. It wasn’t about the money; I’ve never missed it, still don’t. It wasn’t about gaining status. It was about interest, my interest. It was about listening to my inner cues and getting to know myself.

When I didn’t know myself, I worked jobs that weren’t rewarding, I did things that I regret, and I was material because there was nothing else to know, I was shallow. I got into toxic relationships because I chased material ideals both professionally and romantically. Once I started paying attention, these toxicities were my catalyst into myself.

Learning to pay attention to what was going on inside has been my most fulfilling experience. I created a depth to be able to swim in my emotions. I discovered my ego, and I work at humbling it despite its little victories. I found my power in adversity. I found empathy. I found the ability to sonder. I accepted my flaws and in doing so accepted everyone else’s. I wrote cheesy blogs, and I didn’t care. I walked back into my wrongs. I discovered, actually, rediscovered what I’d long forgotten, what was meaningful to me and what recharged me. Primacy.

To stare into a fire. To be naked on a mountain top. To make love. To fuck. To hunt. To create with my hands. To cry. To meditate on the birds. To feel a trees bark and watch the emerald sunlight through the leaves. To rise and to rest by the sun. To reciprocate with people that want the best for me. To take a step from my lounge into the rain.

What I had experienced as an emotional sleepwalker during my late teens and early twenties was what is known as the ‘extinction of experience’. This process is a product of our modern world and we get sucked into it in all sorts of casual, insidious ways. It is the cultural forgetting of our basic psychological needs, of our animalism.

We need to sit by a fire because it has kept us alive and we have been staring into one every night for hundreds of thousands of years. We need to physically create because it has been our expression and innovation for millennia. We need to have sex because, more than anything else, it is our drive to continue. Our sociality goes back through our pre-human ancestors. These things are basic and ancient, and they are engrained in our well-being. But we forget, across our generations and through our ‘developments’, what it means to be apes and this denies our happiness. The experiences that we biologically need to be happy are becoming extinct through simply forgetting. I certainly forgot for a little while.

In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic is revealing to us what a true absence of our primal needs does to our well-being. We can't go out and dance, we can't visit our loves, we are alone with the prospect of a lonely death hanging over us. Well-being has plummeted. So perhaps now it’s time to find and focus on the primal screams that we can let out.

I feel that as modern apes we can find happiness in our modern world if there is some underlying primacy. Am I stewarding the land, or am I walking past the trash? Am I going to the pub with true friends? Am I going to live for an experience, or a post? Am I going to the office this weekend, or am I going camping? Am I going to watch TV tonight, or am I going to create something? Am I contributing to anything in my community?

I’m not perfect but I now know the values and the life that I’m striving for. And I’ve discovered that three walls in the middle of nowhere will make me happier than four walls anywhere.