r/K Selection and Burger Competitions

Picture this. You spend all day running around in the woods. Your muscles are tired, you are starving, and your spear broke in half three hours ago so all you have is the half-spear with the arrowhead. Roots reach up and grab your feet tripping you, branches seem to purposely smack you in the face each time you catch up to the rabbit you are chasing, and suddenly another human sees you and charges, as if he is about to chase you off of your own territory. He tries to stab you with his spear, but you sweep it to the side, close and clinch low on his body, lift him up, and slam him to the ground, getting on top of him. You see a large rock, grab it, and begin bashing him in the head with it until he stops moving, and then for good measure you continue until his skull is visibly caved in. As you look up, you see some unripe blackberries, and what appears to be a recently dead, large bat corpse. It smells a little funky, but looks edible, if you cook it enough. It won’t easily feed you, your wife, and your three kids, but it is better than nothing.

That is pretty much how you spend every day. As your species evolves, that begins to look easy. Humans like you spend their days in the freezing cold, in foxholes at the front lines of a war. Frostbite of the toes in not uncommon, your clothes are often soaked through in the freezing cold, food is paltry MRE’s which you try to make last because supply lines are thin, and every so often the other side charges and you have an hour or so of terror as you try to kill them before they kill you.

Now, picture how differently the dopamine/stress systems in your brain would be exercised, and operate, as you read this:

The bacon bomb explosion burger has been crowned the peoples’ choice award winner for the Florida State Fair, which begins Thursday (Feb. 4)…

The winning burger features fresh ground chuck, with ranch, BBQ sauce and a special seasoning. After the addition of some bacon crumbles, the meat is wrapped in a lattice of fresh bacon and slow roasted with hickory smoke until golden brown, then sliced into patties. This mouthful of a burger is served on a Kaiser roll with a slice of cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, pickles and, for the adventurous, a few more strips of bacon.

The bacon bomb explosion burger edged out the runner up, red neck burger, which is a fresh burger patty, with bacon and cheese, fried bologna, baked beans, potato sticks, lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle, on a toasted bun. The French toast burger was a close third. This breakfast-inspired burger featured a burger patty topped with bacon, cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickle, sandwiched between slices of homemade French toast and drizzled with a special sauce. In fourth place was the ice cream burger, a beef patty with cheese bacon, tomato, onion and pickle, and topped with a coated scoop of Mexican-style fried ice cream.

You go to a fair, play some games, enjoy all sorts of delicious foods, and then partake in a contest to see who can cram the most delicious flavor into a bacon burger that is probably slightly too big to eat fully with comfort. And one burger actually features “Fried Ice Cream.” My mouth is actually watering from just reading the words describing all of that, and yet anyone can actually live that experience every day now.

You can see how stress systems that had evolved to meet the first circumstance would atrophy due to the safety and ease. Meanwhile, dopamine/pleasure systems meant to find the rotted bat pleasurable would be overwhelmed with pleasurable signal levels they were not evolved to encounter on a daily basis. It should be obvious how this overwhelming ease and pleasure could begin to produce breakdowns in cognitive function. The brain literally wasn’t designed for this.

It is really surprising that more people in this world are not batshit crazy – and not at all surprising that we are heading to a full scale governmental/economic collapse.

In fact, in light of the Bacon Bomb Explosion Burger, the Apocalypse really looks like exactly what we should expect.