Thursday, January 12, 2012

Deeper Things: The Meaning of Life

     It’s been a week since my last post. I have all these great subjects I want to cover, but this one I had a little trouble with. It is not that I was having some trouble defining what the meaning of life it is, rather it is because I did not want to come across as too scientific, too dry. Essentially, Deeper Things are supposed to be opinion pieces.
     The meaning of life is not what you think it is. We all fall prey to the romantic notions of nature. It is too easy to be captivated by her beauty. She fills up our senses, sight, smell, touch, and taste. We think she is here to love us and we are here to love her in return. Her true purpose is much less glamorous than that.
     The world consists of reactive and non-reactive elements. The goal of every reactive element is to become a non-reactive element either through bonding with other elements or atomic decay. This is the engine of life. Bonding elements create peptides that become amino acids that become proteins that become bacteria that create life as we know it.
     Everything is designed to harness and use the energy of these reactive elements to create a stable waste product. The goal of every creature is to eat, poop, and procreate. Procreation, at it’s most basic level, is cell division and the result of an abundance of food. The success of a species is based on it’s ability to exploit the resources around it and create more creatures like it.
     The romantic ideal that nature has a balance is a myth. All creatures, either plant or animal, are in a life and death struggle to conquer their environments, to pillage them of all their natural resources. Grasses in the field will rob the ground of sustenance and leave it fallow. Rabbits in Australia, without any reliable predators, ate all the grasses and breed themselves until they created a famine. It’s in the history books. Look it up.
     Evolution is about creating the perfect beast. Humans are just the latest design. While we idealize a life lived as hobbits in hillside furrows eating organic vegetables, we were built to make apple computers and drink soda out of aluminum cans. We may be smart enough to realize that our success as a species will lead to our eventual demise, but the die was cast the moment we stood upright. It is why we are here. It is why nature made us in the first place. It is the meaning of life.

1 comment:

  1. That reminds me of something I heard the other day, goes like this: Just by being alive you are causing something else to simutaneously die. Sounds about right.

    ReplyDelete