Depression often correlates with nihilism, an attitude of seeing no sense, virtue, or meaning in anything. Not even in life, and that can sometimes become dangerous. But it is lunacy and an utterly false assumption to claim there is no sense of life. We just have to think less complex about it.
I make a very controversial take here. The sense of life is to live. If you think about it, why is there this evolutionary drive in us to survive? Just out of an evolutionary biological point, life has at least a purpose: to keep the population and communities stable so we can compete with other animals and survive. But surviving is not sense yet. It is just purpose. The genuine sense in life we find again in evolution, as the historian Yuval Noah Harari explains in this TED Talk,
Humanity runs the world because we are able to cooperate flexibly and in very large numbers with each other. Have you ever thought about fighting a gorilla? I hope you answered that with No because evidently the Gorilla is physically superior to us humans and would easily break our bones. Let me tell you something else. If you, the reader, or any other human were to go to a wilderness area and compete with a gorilla to survive, I would bet $1000 on the Gorilla. Even 10 humans against 10 Gorillas, my money is still on the Gorillas. But if we take 1000 humans and let them compete against 1000 Gorillas, then we know the humans will survive better than the Gorillas or any other animals because we humans cooperate with each other in a way other animals can’t.
Remember that I said the purpose of life is to survive, which is just anevolutionary fact. What happens if ‘’something’’ fulfills a purpose? Then this ‘’something’’ is sense. If something fulfills a certain purpose for us, we can agree that it broadly makes sense to us. If we are hungry, eating makes sense because it stills the hunger. It makes sense to invent cars if we want to travel faster. And regarding life, cooperation is our sense because it is this human interaction that allows us to survive, thus fulfilling our purpose.
This sounds very romantic now, but cooperation systems can be very dark, as Harari describes. Concentration camps, prisons, and executions are all cooperation systems humans invented. But it is still part of what we do as Homo Sapiens to survive as a stable community so that we can compete with other animals.
Yes, I know what you think. We still don’t know why we are in this world. I mean, we could very much ask ourselves why nature wants us to survive, anyway. What is the purpose of that? The world would probably be a better place without us, anyway. But look, we humans have the ability to suffer and this just inevitably creates interest for us, which is to reduce suffering. But wouldn’t death then be the most meaningful thing because it fulfills the purpose of reducing suffering? No, this is a false quick assumption many people make, but death causes in large numbers more suffering because itprevents the whole species from finding the pleasure of life, like collective success, family, and love but also struggle because without struggle there is no success. The best way to end suffering is to cooperate so we can maximize pleasure for ourselves.I can still not tell you why we are on this earth and why all this is necessary, why we suffer, why we want to survive so much, why, why, why? But it doesn’t matter because we will never know. Do you think Gorillas ever ask themselves why they exist? No, they are just trying to make sure they keep existing. Do thesame. You have a purpose which is to survive and your sense in life is to cooperate with other members of your species. Easy, isn’t it? And it has a meta-message that somehow makes us humans closer to each other than we sometimes want to think we are.
So what do you think? Tell me in the replies!
