What if I told you that understanding evolution, that big idea that offends people who don’t get it but explains basically all biology, can help you keep your head up in this crazy world?

Wait, what?

Yup. Science says not to judge yourself or even humanity too harshly. Hear me out.

According to studies, statistics, and stories, people of all ages are increasingly suffering feelings of isolation, failure, anxiety, and depression. If you understand evolution, though, you have a realistic grasp of your place in human history, which already helps. But even more importantly, it’s a short leap from there to knowing deep in your gut that most of the standards by which we judge ourselves – even here in Alabama — are arbitrary nonsense.

Let’s backtrack an eon or two. At the core of evolution is a simple concept: what works, lasts. Whether in plants or people, traits that help individuals or groups survive in a given environment will last long enough to be reproduced. Evolution, aka “nature,” often gets blamed for our negative traits – savagery, gluttony, greed – but it’s responsible for good stuff, too. We didn’t survive saber-toothed tigers and cold caves to take over the planet without positive traits like intelligence, curiosity, cooperation, nurturing, and even altruism.

So, despite centuries of self-serving and self-fulfilling prophecies from institutions that benefit from the belief that humans – even newborns – are inherently evil or sinful (and conveniently need saving by those institutions), people are not inherently good or bad. We’re inherently survivors. If you’re reading this, you’re a survivor from a very long line of survivors. First of all, congratulations. Seriously. Take some pride in that heroic and mathematically unlikely heritage, pride we can all share. Second, remember that almost none of us – despite surprisingly few imbalanced, abused, or neglected exceptions who might seem it – are actually “evil.”

But there are more modern self-serving swindles that make us think we’re deficient, and they reach billions. “Othering”-driven politics implicitly teaches that humanity (at least everyone outside our little tribe) is to be scorned, if not feared. And there’s an even more intentional source of self-judging: Much of our consumer economy depends on making sure we’re insecure. How else to sell, say, diet pills or beard dye or makeup or cosmetic surgery or clothes to people with closets full of clothes, or really any luxury “status symbol”? You get the point: Insecurity helps sell us stuff we don’t need (countless kilotons of stuff that’s polluting the world and depleting its resources, by the way). Put simply, people are profiting from people being down on themselves.

If you understand what humans are and how long it took to get here, though, you’re at least partly inoculated against these harmful hustles. You know that ginned-up self-doubt due to lack of “success” is based on the arbitrary definition of that word at this eyeblink in human history. You also have the reality-based perspective that we’re all just manifestations of eons of genes, environments, the interplay between them, and maybe some knowledge and ethical behavior learned along the way.

People actually tend to do pretty well for themselves given their genetics and environments. Really, it’s astounding we do as well as we do, considering just how new, different, and “unnatural” our modern lives are, compared to how we’ve spent the vast majority of our time on Earth. For most of the hundreds of thousands of years homo sapiens have been around – and you can go back even further for other ancestors – we lived in small, physically active, close-to-nature, close-to-each-other bands. We existed without bustling cities full of strangers, machine-told time, screens, weapons of mass destruction, airplane-spread pandemics, or fast food. But look at us (you) now, somehow navigating this brand-new, unnatural complexity and surviving, possibly thriving, possibly even trying to make things better.

Too many people don’t take in that encouraging long-view. And too many are convinced they’re “failures” based on the short-lived, usually materialistic, superficial standards of one group of linguistically advanced primates. That’s part of the root of why we’ve got more people suffering isolation, depression, and self-doubt, and even killing themselves. (None of this is to belittle other causes of mental health issues, but if we thought better of and more accurately about ourselves and others, some of those causes would be less common. And recovery might even be more likely: think culture of compassion, understanding, and belonging versus one of self-doubt, othering, and judgment.)

On the flip side, we’ve got cocky, misguided clowns high on themselves because they’ve achieved “success” by the standards of a society that’s literally cooking, poisoning, and consuming what keeps us alive, and where children (and adults) are regularly killed for no good reason. Unless you’ve made a dent in hunger or illiteracy or poverty or disease or the new chemicals in our bodies or climate change or violence or nuclear proliferation, check yourself: You’re a mortal, defecating primate working with your mostly unchosen genes and experiences, just like anyone else.

So, despite what powerful interests want you to think, we’re not wretched, inherently sinful failures or God’s gifts to existence. And a real understanding of what we are – animals, but also unique collections of experiences and biology and thoughts, all shaped by a long history of surviving in environments different from today’s – can help keep our “successes” and “failures” in perspective. Most of the standards by which we judge ourselves are temporary (as are the Joneses we might be trying to keep up with), and therefore nothing to get too up or too down about.

Of course, we should all try to do better, always. But we need to see the big picture and cut ourselves some slack, too. It would do us good to grasp that “success” based on the standards of this society isn’t always something to brag about, and those doing the bragging are just evolved primates like anyone else. By the same logic, if you feel isolated, like you don’t fit in, like you’re a “failure,” or like you don’t understand why seemingly everyone cares about things that feel meaningless to you, remember: there’s at least a chance that you’re the sane one.

Keep your head up.

Dan Carsen is a former writer, reporter, and editor turned teacher who still sometimes writes, edits, and even thinks. Share your thoughts with him at [email protected].