a horrifying video imagine feeling instinctively pulled to do a task. something that goes beyond your personal ambitions, your environment, or your job. something that comes from genetic instructions, placed down there over millions of years of evolution, screaming at you from generations past now imagine that task being impossible to do in any satisfactory way. the beaver cannot feel the water, cannot find the wood. there are genetic signals to gather items for the dam, but all the beaver can accomplish in the end is a stage three simulacra. what it will create in this artificial environment will forever be lacking in the eyes of their evolutionary instincts the beaver KNOWS there are unfinished things to do, but it cannot even conceive of what that could be. where is the water? where is the wood? what are these items meant to do? what is the purpose of it all? the beaver does not know. its brothers in the forest do, but that knowledge is forever beyond this domesticated one, who has never even been outside of an air conditioned room but it continues its toil, because the beaver cannot understand that its evolutionary ordained tasks are useless here. the rules of its environment have changed, but it lacks the faculties to recognize that; i simultaneously pity the creature and see myself in it