"Programming computers is cool, but what if you could program humans? You could make someone program computers for you. But is it possible?"

I had this thought in high school, but it was never addressed in my psychology class. So I didn't pursue it further until I happened to read "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg, during an in-school suspension. After finding that programming humans influencing people is possible. And realizing I could learn more from a book in one day than from a class in 18 weeks. I became obsessed with learning about influencing people and with reading.

My initial research led to deeper questions:

• Why do people do what they do?
• What should I influence them to do instead?

These might look more familiar in their personalized form:

• Why am I like this?
• What should I do with my life?

If people struggle to answer these for themselves, I'd need to do a lot of research before giving generalized answers. So I began a long journey of learning everything I could about human behavior and the world.

After reading over 200 books (among other things), I'm ready to share what I've learned. Let's start with an overview of the core ideas explaining why people do what they do.

Survival

Evolution, despite its many controversies, is based on a simple, undisputed mechanism. To be alive today, you must have survived yesterday. Extend this logic back as far as you'd like. There are a limited number of ways to survive, a limited number of paths through history. We can make many assumptions about someone's behavior based on the fact that they're alive.

In general, people are busy staying alive and having kids. This is the driving force behind the majority of human behavior. People will underrate this due to the simplicity and perceived shortcomings:

• What about all the different personalities?
• What about the people who choose not to have kids?

Yes, there are important differences that lead to a variety of outcomes. But the differences are small. This confusion arises because we focus on the differences. But the majority of behavior is unconscious, shared by everyone, baked in so deep we don't need to think about it.

All behaviors lie on a spectrum between genetic and learned. Behaviors beneficial to survival will become more genetic over time (assuming a positive trade-off against other limitations). In other words, they'll become easier to learn and harder to break.

Stories

We're wired to communicate in stories. They're essential to survival, as instructions to get (or avoid) certain results. To predict the future. The format is understandable in its simplest form: "John did X and got Y."

But the complexity multiplies as you add more people. Family, school, business, country, etc. We all know these stories. We spend our lives learning all the characters and their expected behaviors. Then you find out those terms are templates. Everyone has different ideas about the definitions and expectations. And people keep making up new stuff.

A story needs people who believe in it and who can play its characters. If the story keeps them alive, the story will survive, and those traits will become more genetic over time.

There is, however, a major problem created by stories. By predicting the future, we become aware of death.

What's the point if we're going die?

How do we cope with this? More stories, of course. Stories about how you're not actually going to die, your family will survive, you're part of a larger system, etc. There's overlap here with the common stories we've already mentioned (it's more efficient to have multipurpose stories). People will believe many stories, but they'll invest deeply in the ones they use to deny death.

Worse than our own death is the death of everything, nihilism.

What's the point if we're all going to die?

The further you think into the future, the more likely your story will collapse. This is where religious stories shine over more practical stories about genetic survival. If nihilism reduces survival, there may be a link between religious belief and thinking about the future.

Technology

We build tools to better understand and control the environment. We've made a lot of our progress on this. Most people view this progress as positive, albeit requiring a little time to adjust. But others aren't so sure.

• What does technology do?
• What are those adjustments we're making?

Like stories, technology changes the traits that survive. Technology can also change the stories that survive (or vice versa). We need time to fix the stories, changing small details or creating new stories. And time for the negatively affected people to disappear.

Changes in technology create a lot of confusion. They take forever to play out and require endless historical knowledge to understand. Confusion is another feeling that people will do anything to avoid.

Closing

Forgive me for going light on the details and examples. Controversial topics require a lot of care, and I'm still working on my writing skills.

In summary, we were built through survival. We play characters in stories that tend to improve survival. We build tools to control the environment, often breaking things but normally coming out ahead.