all roads lead to food & sex

Ever since God banished Adam from Heaven and humans began to multiply on Earth, the human brain has roughly tripled in size. The area of the brain that's expanded, the neocortex, handles rational thought, reasoning and language. The amygdala, the ancient part of our brain that we share with other mammals, peddles hunger, fear and sexual desire. New and old are locked in a constant battle, and more often than not, the amygdala emerges victorious. It hijacks rational thought and forces the neocortex to rationalise its demands, which are often to satisfy our two most powerful desires: food and sex.

Analyse the main themes of the most popular works of literature, film, music and art, and you will find that they are about desire, lust, hunger and reproduction. Even philosophers, that cohort of meaning-seekers, could not escape the truth that most of human behaviour boils down to the battle between meaning and the want for food and sex. Plato offers a perfect example in his work Phaedrus, where he described the soul as a charioteer driving two horses. One horse is noble — representing honour and spirit, and the other is dark and unruly, representing appetite and lust. The charioteer expends all his energy stopping the dark horse from bolting, but it never stops pulling. The struggle is permanent. Nietzsche went further, claiming that the idea that there is a noble side to us is just a fantasy — a story the weak tell themselves to feel superior to their own bodies. He claimed that all we are is our primal desires, nothing more. Even religion, those doctrines of morality, restraint and spirituality, tempts us to follow their messages with the promise of heaven in the afterlife where rivers flow with milk and honey, fertile gardens burst with ripe fruit and beautiful young virgins are available for our everlasting pleasure.

Philosophers and psychologists have examined this idea for centuries. Freud practically built his empire out of it. The idea that we are driven by our desires was the foundation for much of his life's work. He believed that beneath the polite and polished mask that many of us wear, there lurked a frantic and desperate beast powered largely by appetite and libido. Some took the theory further. Carl Jung believed that Freud's view was too narrow, and that our lustful desires were more than just 'sexual energy'. He believed that there were unknown and powerful forces at play, forces he labelled 'psychic energy'. American philosopher and psychologist, William James, argued that we humans actually have far more animalistic instincts than other mammals. They just crowd each other out, and the noise looks like thought.

An example for the modern age: Why does the capitalist suit labour through early mornings and late nights, spew corporate nonsense on LinkedIn, and kiss the asses of potential client leads? On the surface, he or she is seeking professional growth. But let's strip the motivations down to the bone. Hard work and ambition swell your current account with many pounds and dollars. With more money at your disposal, you upgrade your wardrobe and start food shopping at M&S. You move out of your flat share in a crumbling South London flat and into a smart terraced house in Fulham, where you stand in your marble-topped kitchen, gazing at your shiny new Audi parked outside, while your expensive coffee machine finishes making you an espresso. Whether you're conscious of it or not, these trinkets have made you a more eligible mate, and members of the opposite sex gaze upon you with lust and desire. Studies consistently show that profiles on dating apps that feature markers of status — nice cars, exotic holidays, expensive watches — generate significantly more matches. A well-curated profile is the mating call of the modern age.

You may be thinking, as I first did when I began exploring this idea, that it feels very reductionist — that the advancement of society proves that we are cerebral beings in pursuit of something greater than just the satiation of our primal desires. And there is truth to that. Maslow argued, using his pyramid as a visual aid, that once basic human needs are met — food, sex, shelter — humans aspire to greater ambitions like creativity and the search for meaning. Attachment theorists argue that what people seek is not just sex, but connection: a trusted person who can satisfy deep emotional needs for security, closeness, and acceptance. Viktor Frankl, who understood more than most as to what sustains a person when everything has been stripped from them, concluded in his book Man's Search for Meaning, with a qualification that no one can argue with, that the deepest human drive, the thing that really keeps us going, is neither pleasure nor desire, but meaning — that humans can endure starvation and the loss of desire if they believe their life has a greater purpose. 'He who has a why to live can bear almost any how', as Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols. The holy month of Ramadan puts this concept into practice on an annual basis.

So maybe the truth isn't as black and white as I set out to prove. The truth rarely is. Maybe food and sex aren't the sole motivations for our decisions, but the baseline under the melody. We are meaning-making beings built on top of primal appetite, and what makes us unique is that we can channel those animalistic drives into art, creativity and ambition. Society has been built by harnessing the power of that frantic beast that lurks beneath the surface. Crucially, we must never forget this. We must never forget the primal urges that drive us, because the tragedy — and the comedy — of human behaviour lies in our tendency to imagine ourselves above them, even as they continue to shape our choices from beneath the surface.