Stress

I didn't read the "in med school" part and was expecting the reveal to be that she actually took a material science course.

I mean bones are also just fancy structures so ...
- That’s biomechanics and the main thing you learn in it aside from statics and dynamics is that living osseous tissue is a strange material and it bends so much more than you think it should

Yeah I think about stress everyday too. Not that I have a choice though.

I majored in stress working in retail
- I work at an understaffed convenience store/fast food fusion. The amount of people who make their dogshit life choices my problem makes me look longingly at tall bridges.

Ah well, not the first time I’m fighting biology as a trans dude!

See? That's why rich people are better!

Stress: The mind overriding the body's natural desire to choke the ever-living fuck out of some asshole who desperately deserves it.

lemmy is one of the few platforms where i'm happy to see a post i've already seen months before

Did we ever figure out why we evolved brains that produce cortisol?

- Also, humans are not machines, we need rest and relaxation. It's debatable for why, but life would be a lot more boring if we didn't have a need for relaxation, art, recreation, etc. Just pure work for survival.
Cortisol is actually a really important hormone and it can even make you feel good. The problem is when you have too much too often. It’s like putting your body and mind into sport mode. Very useful in the short term but unsustainable in the long term.
Because people who are born lucky enough to have an easy life are likely to have more kids.
Using cortisol to magnify that improves selection bias.
The rest is math.
Evolution is a bitch.
- Uh, poor people tend to have more children than rich people.
- A successful organism would not have evolved to highly express cortisol to weed itself out in the case that it has a stressful life. It makes no sense for an organism to evolve a trait that makes it at best equally likely and at worst less likely to reproduce.
  The reason we release excess cortisol in modern life is because our bodies did not evolve for constantly present stressors, they evolved to be stressed in a situation, run away from the tiger, and then you're good.

That professor's name? Robert Sapolsky.

(probably)

Hate it when university professors go for historical materialism

Trump supporters are a minority, so I think this checks out.