The Lie We Love: How Our Caveman Brains Betray Us in the Modern World

We are addicted to tidy stories.

The entrepreneur who hustled from a garage to a billion-dollar IPO.
The athlete whose superhuman discipline carved a path straight to the gold medal.
The student who credits their straight-A success to nothing but burning midnight oil.

These narratives are comforting. They feel fair, almost Newtonian:
Work hard → Apply skill → Reap reward.

It’s the foundational creed we apply not just to success stories, but to our understanding of how the world works.

Yet, this linear model is fragile. For every celebrated triumph, there are countless others—just as gritty, just as talented—who followed the same formula and fell short. Why do some meticulously laid plans shatter, while others stumble into breakthroughs they could never have engineered?

This is where the pristine story frays, revealing a messier, more potent force at play: randomness.

Beneath the clean narrative of cause and effect lies a turbulent, unpredictable current that shapes outcomes in ways we are profoundly ill-equipped to see. Our blindness to it is the greatest distortion of all.

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The Caveman’s Bargain: A Broken Promise

For most of human history, the world operated on a brutal covenant:
Chase the gazelle → eat. Miss the rustle in the grass → become dinner.

Cause and effect were immediate, tangible, unforgiving. Effort and outcome were locked in a visceral relationship. Your brain learned a fundamental rule: act with skill and force, and the world will yield a predictable result.

This wiring remains our default setting. Psychologist Steven Pinker calls it an “intuitive physics” and “intuitive biology,” honed for a world of spears and predators, not portfolios and probability. When we pour in effort, our inner caveman expects a corresponding return. Anything less feels like a cosmic violation.

But the modern world has quietly voided that contract. It no longer runs on direct causality.
It runs on probability.

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From Savannah to Stock Markets: A Mind Mismatch

Here lies the great mismatch. We evolved to solve immediate, concrete problems, but now deploy the same mental machinery in abstract domains — careers, investments, creative acclaim.

Our inner caveman, desperate for coherence, looks at a spectacular success and instinctively draws a straight line: They worked harder. They wanted it more. We invent tidy stories, because as Kahneman and Tversky showed, we are irrepressible pattern-seeking machines.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb warned in Fooled by Randomness, we often end up celebrating “noise” while mistaking it for “skill.”

In complex systems, effort is merely an input, not a guarantee. Its connection to results is mediated by randomness, timing, and hidden variables our brains cannot see.

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Survivorship Bias: The Cemetery of the Unseen

Our stories are poisoned by a blind spot: we only hear from the winners.

We study the one startup that soared, not the hundred that vaporized. We immortalize the Olympic gold medalist, ignoring the ten thousand athletes who trained with equal ferocity but fell short.

In the ancestral world, this made sense. Survivors were the data; the fallen were irrelevant. Today, the same instinct distorts reality. We mistake the visible few for the full picture — a logical error called survivorship bias.

We are learning from a sample curated by chance itself.

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Why Randomness Feels Like a Personal Insult

To our prehistoric psyche, randomness wasn’t just incorrect — it was dangerous.

If survival were truly random, why hunt? Why persist? Our brains evolved to overestimate control because those who acted decisively survived.

That’s why randomness feels like a personal affront. When our hard work doesn’t pay off, we don’t just feel disappointed; we feel cheated. Our inner caveman screams, I deserve the kill, while the modern world shrugs, governed by dice we cannot see.

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Effort in the Age of Randomness: Your Right to the Roll

So does this make effort pointless? Not at all. It redefines its role.

Think of effort not as a lever guaranteeing results, but as the ticket to roll the dice. You cannot control the number, but you can earn more rolls. More attempts increase the chance that preparation meets a lucky break.

This is what Taleb calls exposure to serendipity.

The wisdom is ancient. The Bhagavad Gita framed it centuries ago:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥
(2.47)

You have the right to action, but not to its fruits.
Do not make the fruits of action your motive,
nor let your attachment be to inaction.

Agency lies in the action. The outcome belongs to the universe.

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The Cost of Denial: Why This Reframe Matters

Clinging to the caveman’s fallacy of fairness creates needless suffering:

• Winners over-credit their genius, weaving morality tales of grit while ignoring chance.
• Losers internalize failure, drowning in inadequacy when results were often statistical variance.

Recognizing randomness doesn’t devalue success. It restores humility in victory and compassion in defeat.

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A New Playbook for an Ancient Brain

We cannot delete the caveman’s code, but we can design around it:

1. Play Repeated Games. Don’t stake identity on one outcome. Build skills and systems that allow many iterations.
2. Engineer Resilience. Seek antifragility, as Taleb advises — structures that gain from volatility.
3. Treat Outcomes as Data. Wins and losses are feedback, not verdicts. Learn, but don’t let them define you.
4. Anchor Identity in Effort. Find pride in what you control: persistence, process, preparation.

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The Liberating Conclusion

Your Inner Caveman craves a fair world — toil → reward. But modern life is probabilistic, not causal.

Here’s the liberating truth:
Randomness may shape your results, but effort shapes your character.

You cannot control the dice, but you can control your willingness to keep rolling.

The shift is to stop demanding guarantees from a universe that deals in probabilities. Invest in your actions. Release attachment to outcomes.

Because often, what separates the celebrated from the overlooked isn’t who worked harder — but who, by chance, rolled a six when it mattered most.

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References & Further Reading

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Fooled by Randomness (2001)
• Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
• Steven Pinker – How the Mind Works (1997)
• Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman – Prospect Theory papers (1970s–80s)
• Bhagavad Gita – Chapter 2, Verse 47

Related Neurocient Articles:
The Concrete Mind in an Abstract World