Success Quote by Keith Henson

Henson’s line smuggles a cold, almost impolite clarity into a conversation people usually dress up as “choice” or “character.” He reduces much of human behavior to two overlapping feedback systems: the quick-hit neurochemical bribe and the slow, species-level accounting of who leaves descendants. The intent isn’t to deny meaning or morality so much as to relocate them downstream of biology, where “wanting” is often just the brain’s reward circuitry doing its job with the tools evolution handed it.

The subtext is deliberately deflationary. When he says “pleasurable chemicals,” he’s puncturing our self-flattering narratives: the ambitious career move, the late-night scrolling, the risky romance, the righteous outrage. All can be reframed as behaviors that spike dopamine or soothe cortisol. That framing carries an implicit warning: if you can identify the chemical payout, you can predict repetition, and if you can engineer the payout (advertising, apps, ideology, substances), you can steer people without ever arguing with their stated values.

Contextually, this sits in a scientist’s tradition of evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology: proximate causes (what feels good now) versus ultimate causes (what persists across generations). The elegance is the timescale contrast. “Hours to years” captures addiction, habit, and modern reinforcement machines; “over generations” gestures at why certain desires remain stubborn even when they misfire in contemporary environments. It’s a theory of human glitchiness: ancient incentives running on new hardware, endlessly exploitable, occasionally adaptive, rarely dignified.