The Meaning Of Life

“What is the meaning of life?” Although this is a pretty frequent question amongst almost every human being, it is sometimes cast away from the regular guy’s everyday line of thoughts.

The answer can’t be specified accurately, but there are some patterns in both Nature and men that give us a glimpse of our purpose in life.

In Nature, every single living being strives for one objective: ensure its survival. How do they manage to comply with this objective? By hunting down prey for food or finding good plants to eat, finding shelter against the weather conditions and predators, and last but not least, reproducing. But while they struggle to survive, deep underneath their simple existence, their bodies are at work: genetically speaking, that is. The simple fact that they struggle to survive means they are also trying to adapt themselves to environmental and food chain changes. This may not be particularly visible immediately but generation after generation one single different gene can make the difference between survival and extinction.

I can then conclude that in Nature, the purpose of every living being is not to survive but also to evolve, ensuring the continuation of the species.

Taking all this into account, it gets easier to understand our own purpose in life. I believe our struggle to survive is, on the whole, different from a rabbit’s or a zebra’s. We don’t need to actually hunt down our food. We can either raise it or buy it in the market just around the corner. But on the other hand, we need to work for money in order to buy food. We don’t need to hide from predators: technically, we have no natural predators. We are only threatened pretty much by ourselves and our wars. We have our houses to protect us from the weather. We have proven ourselves pretty adaptable to changes.

So right now we know that one of our objectives during our lifetime is to try and improve the community in order to get the money to pay for food and other goods and commodities. But how to ensure the continuation of the human species?

Human beings have proven themselves pretty adaptable to changes, at all levels (environmental, etc). It is even possible to compare humans with virus: we were (and still are) capable to establish ourselves anywhere on the planet’s surface. Genetically, we don’t differ much from the original Homo sapiens sapiens. But changes do occur, although too small to be detected when considering a short amount of time. Changes do occur during the division of our sexual cells: they are not exactly divided in two, as some small mutations occur, almost imperceptible. These mutations may cause absolutely no effects other than maybe a slight change in the hair’s colour, or they may cause severe deficiencies or actually make us immune to a given type of virus or bacteria. The fact is that we are permanently evolving, making improvements under the hood, without even knowing it, just by doing something as natural and necessary as reproducing. Natural selection at its best (or worst).