Fanatical Military Recruiting

19The Science Behind the Hurt

We shouldn’t romanticize rejection. There’s nothing romantic about rejection. It’s horrible.

—Marlon James, Jamaican novelist

The genesis of much of our behavior—good and bad, destructive and effective—lies outside the reaches of our conscious minds. We act but are unaware of why we act unless we choose to tune in and become aware.

Awareness is the intentional and deliberate choice to monitor, evaluate, and modulate your emotions so that your responses to the people and environment around you are congruent with your intentions and objectives. Awareness of why you fear rejection begins with an intellectual understanding of the science behind the hurt.

I want you to image that you were alive 40,000 years ago. You live in a cave with a group of people as part of a hunter-gatherer community, in what is now France. It’s a dangerous world. Neighboring tribes fight and compete for scarce resources. When you are out hunting for dinner, there is usually something hunting you. It’s a brutal, survival-of-the-fittest environment.

You depend on your tribe for everything. You cannot survive on your own. Should you get kicked out of the cave into the dark, you would have no fire, no food, no protection, and no companionship. Essentially, it’s a death sentence. It’s a world that’s hard to imagine in our tech-dominated modern society, where food, shelter, transportation, and even companionship is at our fingertips with a click or swipe on our smartphone screens. ...