For as long as I’ve known what a visit to the dentist for a checkup and cleaning meant, I have religiously flossed my teeth two or three times a day for at least two days prior to my appointment. The other 363-days are hit or miss…mostly miss.

This same logic applies to the reason why I schedule my yearly dermatologist checkup in the winter, so as to give the evidence of my unprotected summer sun exposure time to fade and limit the “tisk..tisks” from my porcelain skinned dermatologist.

This compulsion to cram for an exam with medical professionals or attempt to buffalo them into thinking you have been fastidiously following their advice is curious. Why do I put a futile last-ditch effort in to rid my teeth of the tartar I am paying the dental hygienist to remove? Why do I care that someone I see once a year is not going to approve of my freckled farmer tan and bronzed bald spot?

Whenever curious behavior comes around, which, like a tetherball, it is most assuredly to do on the regular, I generally try and ponder the potential utility it served us human folk in our distant evolutionary past. Not the curious activity of flossing, first introduced in 1815, or the application of sunscreen, invented in 1938, but the root source of the curious propensity to experience guilt or shame when we haven’t done something we have been told to do. Something that we know is for our own good.

The root sources that are many thousands and millions of years deep in our DNA, the root sources that have served to anchor the various twists and turns of human evolution and helped to foster the successful propagation, flourishment, and spread of our intrepid species to all corners of the world.

Cave folk didn’t have a dentist or dermatologist to answer to, but they did live amongst a small tribe of other cave folk that it was in their best interest to get along with. Squeaky wheels didn’t get the grease in days of yore, they got uprooted and removed so as not to negatively impact the strength and stability of the tribe. All for one, one for all…or else. Feelings of guilt and shame are powerful evolved prosocial cues meant to nudge us in a direction that contributes to this strength and stability.

Nudge us to share the wildebeest we managed to bring down. Nudge us to floss so our hygienist doesn’t have to dig wildebeest bits out of our nasty mouths. Nudge us to apply sunscreen so our dermatologist doesn’t have to lop pieces of potentially cancerous flesh from our leathery husks. Nudge us to be good, to be kind, to go along to get along.

I’m not fooling either of them in my attempt to fool myself, but I will most likely continue to try and try again. So it goes.

To reward my efforts at foolery, my dermatologist is quite keen on brandishing her liquid nitrogen spray to searingly spritz spots she deems suspect. She seems to derive great joy in this spritzing, and the “suspect spots” always seem to be on the most prominent portions of my nose and forehead. A not-so-subtle sunscreen reminder in flashing red for all to see…scarlet letters to shame and guilt me into SPF-50 compliance.

I’ll do better…next year. “Here comes the sun, doo-doo-doo. Here comes the sun. It’s all right. It’s all right.”