100% of the credit for this perfect metaphor goes to Alexa Kelly, winner of the Instagram competition.
She lives a life of privilege in her aquatic cage. She has fish whenever she is hungry. She has access to veterinary medicine. She is safe from the dangers of the high seas. So why is she grinding her teeth down to the nerve? Why is her dorsal fin drooping? Why does she repeatedly ram her head into the glass walls?
She was born into captivity. She knows nothing else. There is no memory of the high seas, of the pod, of diving to 500-meter depths and traveling across 40 miles of salty blue in search of seals and fish. Does she even know that she is a great matriarch of the open ocean?
Yes. She knows it in her bones, in her seven-thousand pounds of flesh and muscle, in her gyrified, ultra-intelligent brain. She knows it without knowing it, because that’s how evolution shaped her over millions of years. That’s what she was made for.
What do we want from her? A performance. We want to see her jump and spin on command. Look how well she obeys her oppressors! What grace and intelligence! Surely, this is her calling. Surely, she is thriving.
Could she tell you what she’s missing? Could she tell you about the pod, about what it’s like to hunt or play in the high seas with your sons and daughters, sisters, cousins, grandchildren? Could she tell you about what it’s like to call and click as they circle a stingray? Could she tell you about how they raise the calves together, teaching them all that they know through careful coaching, demonstration and imitation? Of course not. She’s lived here all her life, in this four-walled home. She doesn’t know that the open ocean is her birth-right. She only knows her suffering is real.
The orca in captivity is not unlike a human mother inside the four walls of a single family home, cut off from her extended family and community, left alone to care for her children. She seems to have everything she needs: food, water, a safe place to live, access to modern medicine. Shoulnd’t she be grateful? We want her to be grateful. More than that, we want her to advertise just how great it is. We want her to post photos of her family smiling at the beach, her toddler holding an ice cream cone dripping from the heat, the baby perched on her hip in an impossibly cute sunhat. We don’t want to see the truth of what it’s like to care for a newborn who won’t sleep, alone in the middle of the night. We don’t want to see her screaming into a pillow out of frustration, careful not to wake her husband who has to go to work in the morning.
Evolutionary mismatch is a term used by scientists to describe a situation in which the environment changes faster than an animal can evolve. An orca that has evolved to roam across 40 miles of open ocean in a pod with 15 relatives will suffer if contained in social isolation in an aquarium twice the length of her body. Feeding her, keeping her alive, is not enough. She suffers, and her suffering is obvious to anyone who sees her after hours, after the performance is over.
Humans, like any other animal, can suffer from evolutionary mismatch. For about 99% of our existence as a species, humans lived as nomadic foragers, or “hunter-gatherers.” The transition to agriculture only happened in the last 10,000 years and the industrial revolution happened only a few generations ago. In a very short span of time, humans have managed to dramatically reshape the environments in which we live. Evolution, on the other hand, is slow; the result of incremental changes and selective pressure happening over thousands of generations. The result is that humans are now living in an environmental and social context that is radically different from the one in which we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. We have put the orca in the tank, and now she is suffering.
We have understood for some time now that evolutionary mismatch accounts, in large part, for the proliferation of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain kinds of cancer, but what we are only beginning to recognize is that it also accounts for a large number of psychological disorders. Even less studied is how it relates to the experience of motherhood and postpartum depression.
I believe that much of the suffering and exhaustion faced by mothers in contemporary post-industrial societies is the result of evolutionary mismatch. We are captive orcas, separated from our pods inside the four walls of our single family homes, craving the open ocean without really consciously understanding what’s wrong or why we are unhappy. We are unable to name the source of our suffering, yet we suffer. Often, we blame ourselves rather than the environment. What’s wrong with me? We think. Look at my neighbor, how well she jumps and spins for the clapping crowds. We don’t see what’s happening inside her tank after hours. We believe we are bad orcas when in fact, we are simply poorly adapted to life in an aquarium.