we change the course of our actions according to what we learn is good for our survival.

The evolutionary process of productive adaption and ascent — the process of seeking, obtaining, and pursuing more and more ambitious goals — does not just pertain to how individuals and society move forward. It is equally relevant when dealing with setbacks, which are inevitable. At some point in your life you will crash in a big way. You might fail at your job or with your family, lose a loved one, suffer a serious accident or illness, or discover the life you imagined is out of reach forever. There are a whole host of ways that something will get you . At such times, you will be in pain and might think that you don’t have the strength to go on. You almost always do, however; your ultimate success will depend on you realizing that fact, even though it might not seem that way at the moment.

This is why many people who have endured setbacks that seems devastating at the time ended up happy as (or even happier than) they originally were after they successfully adapted to them. The quality of your life will depend on the choices you make at those painful moments. The faster one appropriately adapts, the better. No matter what you want out of life, your ability to adapt and move quickly and efficiently through the process of personal evolution will determine your success and your happiness. If you do it well, you can cahnge your psychological reaction to it so that what was painful can become something you crave.

we have to learn to adapt wherever we found ourselves.

Survival requires that we learn to laugh things off and start over

Life is a constant adaptation.

"We are an adaptable species and this adaptability has enabled us to survive. However, adaptability can also constitute a threat; we may become habituated to certain dangers and fail to recognize them until it's too late. Nuclear armaments are the most conspicuous example; as you read this you are in effect wearing a military uniform and sitting in a very exposed trench. You exist at the whim of people whose power does not derive from your own consent and who regard you as expendable, disposable. You merely failed to notice the moment at which you were conscripted. A "normal" life consists in living as if this most salient of facts was not a fact at all."

Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators?

They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.

They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

I though productivity was what survival looked like.

Reading these stories, it's tempting to think that
the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting,
navigating, skills of survival and escape. Even in the
everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive
manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged
occasions than those at hand, as though to express some
sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face
them. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival,
seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called
for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to
deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a
stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the
transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom
is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of
this journey between the near and the far goes on in
every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend,
an old letter will remind you that you are not who you
once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued
this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without
noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the
strange has become familiar and the familiar if not
strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown
garment. And some people travel far more than
others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate
or at least unquestioned sense of self and those
who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for
satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values
and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to
burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

You had to make your choice between survival and efficiency, though in the long run survival was optimum efficiency, no matter how much time and effort it took.

We survive by learning from pain

If we respond to the message of pain or disease, the demand for adaptation, we can break through to a new level of wellness.

We are biological machines programmed to survive and replicate. Happy is anti-evolution.

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game.