Male grayling butterflies prefer to mate with darker female graylings. When caged with a female grayling and a cardboard cutout of a grayling painted black, the male will choose the cardboard cutout over the female. Beyond being an example of bro falling for an unrealistic standard of beauty, such a preference reveals that even in matters fundamental to survival and reproduction, these creatures can be seduced by artificial models they’d never encounter in nature.
For the grayling, the artificial black butterfly is a superstimulus (if that’s even a word), an exaggerated version of something it’s naturally attracted to but would never find in its environment.
We humans have our equivalents. Apps that entertain us in perfect intervals. Games that spoon-feed us little victories. Junk food with flavors the most genetically modified of vegetables can’t match. Drugs, porn, gambling, doomscrolling, sour gummy worms (the red/blue ones)… They’re all black butterflies, engineered to exploit our pleasure circuitry. And we, running our buggy mental software, are wired to really want them, even if they aren’t real, natural, or good for us.
The most satisfying, convenient, easily digestible thing will be the most appealing in any given moment. That goes for food, chemicals, and the evolving borg of digital content. We are so often sponges seeking filthy water. But cramming something into every free, boring, or uncomfortable moment doesn’t just fill time. It expands your hunger.
Michael Pollan wrote that “you are what you eat eats, too.” This quote was meant for the quality of the food you’re eating, like the prairie grass or nuclear cornmeal the cow ate before becoming your hamburger. But this idea of being what you eat eats, too, also applies to ideas. The people you listen to are shaped by the people they listen to (and maybe by things those people are trying to sell).
So look upstream. Be judicious about what you consume. Even passive and inadvertent exposure, like what you overhear, scroll past, or absorb in the background, is a form of consumption. Each thing you let in takes up space, has a chance to dump a tiny wheelbarrow of contagion into you.
Technology has made these black butterflies more accessible and abundant. They’re multiplying, evolving, learning exactly what makes you unable to look away. Black butterflies grow more personal and prevalent by the day.
It’s okay to chase black butterflies sometimes, to let artificial things delight us. We all need occasional escape, quick hits of manufactured joy. Serotonin is serotonin.
Yet these black butterflies, for better or worse, reshape our expectations of ourselves and others. They can inspire or frustrate, fuel us or incinerate attention, build wealth or bankrupt us, strengthen or shatter our self-image.
And still we chase them, even as they empty us out, leave us hungry for more and somehow less satisfied than before we caught them.
Remember:
- Your mind, like your body, is built from what you feed it.
- Avoid what feeds you without nourishing you. What you give to junk, you take from quality.
- Cravings grow as you indulge them, and overconsumption further increases your appetite.
- Gossip, sensational news, and personal dramas can be very enticing but often lack any benefit. Most “urgent” information becomes irrelevant within days. Avoid people and groups that subsist on sleaze.
- The most successful people are brutally selective about their inputs.
Routinely ask yourself:
- What are my black butterflies?
- Which keep fluttering back?
- What desires do they create, stoke, or fulfill?
- How would I feel if they disappeared tomorrow?
Answer, then eliminate with care.
“Wisdom is always wanting the same thing, always rejecting the same thing.”
~Seneca, Letters on Ethics (Book)
“As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals.”
~James Clear, Atomic Habits (Book)
