“I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.” — The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
There’s a way of looking at the world that, once it settles in, doesn’t leave
Take whatever we consider the most advanced technology of any era. The printing press. Gunpowder. The internet. Artificial intelligence. Every single one of them was born from the same two impulses: the desire for more resources and the desire for more control. Money and power. That’s not a conspiracy or a design flaw. Nobody planned it that way. It’s just where things end up when billions of human drives interact over time. The technology changes every generation. The destination hasn’t changed once.
This isn’t a complaint. It’s an observation about the machinery. The pattern is so consistent that it looks designed, but it wasn’t. It grew. The way crystals grow, from simple rules repeated at scale. Nobody sat in a room and decided that all technology should serve money and power. No committee runs it. It just… does. Because that’s what the machinery underneath produces.
There’s actually something in physics that works the same way, and most of us already accept it without thinking twice. At the quantum level, particles do strange things. Probabilistic, uncertain, nothing like the world we touch. But zoom out far enough, let trillions of those interactions pile up, and you get the solid table we put our coffee on every morning. The table is real. We can lean on it. But it is not what we think it is. Mostly empty space, held together by forces that have nothing to do with how the table feels under our hands.
Civilization is that table
Human drives at the individual level are not complicated. We want to survive. We want to pass something on. We want to belong somewhere. We want to feel safe. At the macro level, all of those drives interacting across time produce what we call society. Laws, nations, currencies, moral codes, religions. They feel solid. We lean on them. We build entire lives on top of them. But they are not the ground. They are the table. And underneath, the machinery is something else entirely.
The Same Machinery
About a thousand years ago, China entered one of the worst periods in its recorded history. The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Fifty years. The Tang Dynasty, one of the greatest civilizations the world had seen, collapsed into fragments. What followed was not just political chaos. It was a window into what the machinery produces when the ordinary structures dissolve and get replaced by something far more raw.
During those fifty years, dynasties rose and collapsed with the rhythm of seasons. Warlords carved territories. Alliances formed and shattered within months. The names on the throne changed so frequently that keeping track was almost pointless. The laws, the courts, the systems of governance that took centuries to build, all dissolved into raw competition for survival.
Huang Chao, a figure from this period, still gets argued about today. He was a salt trader, educated, a poet. The system rejected him (he failed the imperial exams), and he burned it down. His rebellion swept across China and captured the capital Chang’an. He crowned himself emperor. He also oversaw one of the most brutal campaigns in Chinese history. His armies ate human flesh. Entire cities were massacred. The scale of suffering during that period is difficult to comprehend, even by the standards of ancient warfare.
The same human machinery that produced the poetry also produced the cannibalism. The same man who wrote lyrical verses about golden armor presided over mass slaughter. There was no switch that flipped. No transformation from good to evil. The machinery was always the same. It just expressed differently depending on the conditions.
And the people?
Not the emperors or the rebels. The actual people. They did what we are all doing right now. They farmed. They traded what they could. They protected their families. They tried to eat. They tried to not die. In the worst moments and in the best, this is the constant. The systems above keep changing shape. The animal underneath has been the same for as long as we’ve been human.
From the Roman Empire to the Warring States to the collapse of the Soviet Union, every cycle of rise and fall tells the same story from a different angle. We build elaborate systems, live inside them long enough to believe they are permanent, and then watch them dissolve. Each time, we are surprised. Each time, we rebuild. Each time, we forget again.
We forget because the construction is warm. It gives us certainty, identity, a place to stand. Forgetting might actually be necessary. A species that constantly questioned the ground beneath its feet might never build anything at all. But there is a cost. We lose track of what is actually ours and what we borrowed from the construction.
The Decoration We Believe the Most
Of all the things we constructed, there is one that we protect more fiercely than any other. More than money. More than nations. More than God … for some of us. We constructed it so thoroughly, decorated it so beautifully, that suggesting it is a construction at all feels like a violation.
Love
Not love as a biological impulse. That part is easy to accept. Of course there is a drive to protect offspring, to bond, to form alliances. Nobody argues with that. The part that is harder to sit with is this: the thing we experience as love, the whole feeling of it, is not separate from that biological machinery. It is the macro expression of it. The table again. Real to the touch. But not what we think it is underneath.
We feel love as something elevated. Something beyond the animal. A mother staying up all night with a sick child, that feels like it transcends biology. A person choosing their partner’s happiness over their own, that feels like something higher. And in a sense, it is. The experience is real. The feeling is real. But the mechanism underneath is simpler than the experience suggests.
There is a thought I have carried for a long time. All love is self-fulfilling. Every act of love, including the ones that look the most selfless, serves a biological need in the giver. The mother who sacrifices everything for her child is also fulfilling something in herself. A need to protect what is hers. A need to be essential to someone. A need to extend her existence beyond her own body. This is not a criticism. It is how the machinery works. The biological drive to protect offspring is strong enough on its own. It doesn’t need decoration. But we decorated it anyway. We built entire moral systems, legal frameworks, social expectations, all reinforcing the idea that this particular expression of biology is sacred.
And then the proof shows up in the places we don’t want to look
If love were truly selfless, there would be no conflict between loved ones. Think about that for a moment. If a mother’s love were purely about the child’s wellbeing, there would be no resentment when the child makes choices the mother disagrees with. If a partner’s love were purely about the other person’s happiness, there would be no jealousy, no possessiveness, no hurt when the attention goes elsewhere. But these conflicts are not exceptions. They are the norm. And they only make sense if both sides are fulfilling their own needs through the relationship.
The conflicts are not a failure of love. They are evidence of what love actually is. Two sets of needs, running through the same relationship, colliding the moment those needs point in different directions. The decoration tells us love is about the other person. The machinery says it has always been about both.
In Chinese culture, the intergenerational contract is enormous and deeply embedded
I grew up inside the Chinese family system, so this is not abstract to me.
Parents invest heavily in their children. They buy apartments. They relocate to help raise grandchildren. They pour savings into education, into building a life that the next generation can stand on. In many families, this investment continues well into the child’s 30s and 40s. I know a lot of people in my generation who still rely on significant help from their parents.
On the other side of the contract, children are expected to care for aging parents. Financial support, physical presence, emotional closeness. Filial piety (孝) is not just a cultural value. It is a structural expectation woven into law, social norms, and the rhythm of daily life.
Everyone calls this love. And it is love. The feelings are genuine. The sacrifices are real. The care is real. But it is also a system. An economic architecture disguised in the language of devotion. “I invest in you now, you take care of me later.” Nobody says this out loud. The decoration would never allow it. But watch what happens when someone breaks the contract.
From the parent side: “After everything I did for you.” “You owe me this.” “How can you be so ungrateful?” A child moves to another country and never comes home again. A child stops calling. A child builds a life that has no room for the people who built theirs around that child.
From the child side: “I never asked for any of this.” “You didn’t do it for me, you did it for yourself.” “Stop controlling my life.” A child rejects the path the parents invested everything into. A child chooses a partner the family disapproves of. A child walks away from the contract they never signed.
This is not the language of selfless love. On either side. This is the language of a breached contract. The decoration tears, and what shows through is the machinery: two parties, each fulfilling their needs through the other, discovering that the needs no longer align.
And this pattern is not unique to Chinese culture
Every culture has its version. The typical American family has its own contracts, its own unspoken expectations, its own quiet resentments when the deal breaks down. The decoration looks different. The machinery underneath is identical.
What makes love remarkable is not that it transcends biology. It doesn’t. What makes it remarkable is that biology produced something that feels like transcendence. The machinery, through billions of interactions across thousands of generations, generated an experience so rich that we genuinely believe it comes from somewhere higher. The table doesn’t just feel solid. It feels sacred. And maybe that is the most extraordinary thing the machinery has ever done.
From Earth
After sitting with all of this, a question stays
We built civilization. We built moral codes and legal systems and social expectations. We built nations and currencies and technologies. We built love, or at least the version of it we recognize: decorated, contractual, beautiful and fragile.
After everything we built, what’s actually ours
There is one thing that was never constructed. Never decorated. Never taught, legislated, or moralized into existence. Something so fundamental that it doesn’t need a contract, doesn’t need reciprocity, doesn’t need anyone else at all.
The instinct to take care of yourself
Not the self-care that gets sold back to us as another product. Not “treat yourself” or “you deserve this.” Something much more basic than that. The body feeding itself when it is hungry. The mind pulling away from what hurts it. The impulse to keep going, even when the construction is collapsing and the decoration is in pieces. Before anyone taught us what love is supposed to look like, before the contracts and the expectations and the guilt, there was just this. A living thing, taking care of itself, because that is what living things do.
And somehow, in all the building and decorating and forgetting, this is the one we neglect the most. We pour ourselves into the systems. We chase the scoreboards we invented. We fulfill the contracts of love. We perform our roles in the construction so thoroughly that the original impulse, the one that was never invented, just sits there underneath. Waiting.
From the earth. From the ground level. From the place we started and the place we return to when everything else is stripped away.
Love. The original kind. The one that was always there.
From earth, with love.
Originally published on Five-Step Snake