The Meaning of Life

I live with this constant, horrible guilt because I feed off the Growth Machine just like most other people. I suck at the nipples of the Eternal Growing Empire, and I try to justify that in my mind, and I really just wish I could be free.

But I need money to buy gasoline and food, and those two items keep me going so that I can earn money to buy, yeah, more gasoline and food. So, the vast majority of us just live on this Planet for the sake of just being here, and every day we consume and slowly suck the Earth dry, and we multiply for our own gratification, without really thinking why we multiply.

So, then I'm suddenly stuck with this question that never goes away: What is the meaning of life? And some will tell me to "glorify God," which is a religious buzzword that no one can explain, exactly, but I guess it means to make God happy. So, God, I HOPE I'VE MADE YOU HAPPY!

Others will say my purpose is to perpetuate the species, and if you study evolution long enough you know the second phase is to get your young to reproductive age. And maybe the third reason for existing is to provide wisdom for my young, or to teach them compassion by caring for some old farty invalid.

And then you have to ask, what is the goal of humankind? Well, I always figured we'd just work out our problems, create utopia, and then colonize the Universe. In another 100,000 years there will be TRILLIONS of us all over the galaxy, and then onto neighboring galaxies. But somewhere else another species has the same idea, and in a few hundred thousand years we'll clash and wipe each other out.

More realistically, we can look around and tell what will happen to the human species — extinction. Yes, we've ended the line for thousand of species who are gone forever, thanks to our reckless destruction of the Earth. So, we think we're special and that we are destined to survive, but that's probably not true at all. The greatest mistake we ever made was to somehow think we are better than cockroaches.

So, you can define the meaning of life a hundred different ways, but I think the simple goal is to make things better. But if we keep making things better and reach Nirvana, then we humans will grow soft, for it is adversity that helps us to grow and evolve. So, the reality is that we are stuck in a total no win situation. Billions of dollars and hundreds of labor hours are spent trying to defeat cancer, and for what reason? And it's the bitterest of ironies that most of the cancers are caused by our lifestyles and by the thousands of chemicals that are released into the atmosphere in our effort to make life more comfortable. We just end up killing ourselves trying to achieve ultimate comfort. That's fucking nuts.

I really don't have the answers other than to say that from what I've seen so far, EVERYTHING in this world is totally screwed up, and I have no idea if it HAS to be that way or not. If everything were UNSCREWED then we'd probably just find another way to screw ourselves up.

So, half of me is totally disgusted with this world, and with people who are in a self-destruct mode, and have no idea that with their cars, and big house, and big families, they are actually killing themselves in an ignoble, ignorant suicide. And, the other half of me agrees with the first half, so I'm of the unanimous opinion that humanity is a totally dysfunctional species. We may very well find that the heyday of our existence was 300,000 years ago when we ran carelessly and playfully in the African savanna.

The Goose