Meaning of Life

I had a pleasant conversation recently that started from the topic of religion. We discussed how different cultures have different beliefs, but ultimately shared the same values in the same set of values exists in cultures that don’t have religion at all.

The conclusion was that the differences in religion doesn’t matter much. Even though different countries have people live very different lives at the core it’s all the same.

The values are simple of course. Don’t kill, don’t steal, and so on. They define how the society can leave and prosper together. Now the thing is that this values are good for society as a whole they are not always the best mean for advantage of a single person. And so we have laws, and police, and judges, and prisons, and punishment. The institutions that are meant to bring fairness and justice to all the people in the society. Of course, the concept of justice is an elusive one. Without a single definition everyone agrees upon, that would apply to every situation. Is it justice to kill a person who killed another person, or is it justice to lock them in a cell? What’s the society needs is to stop the bloodshed, so the family of a victim don’t take revenge over there criminal, creating a family feud, that takes more lives over the years. Having the offender in a cell, protects the society from them. And protects the offender from the revenge. In the absence of law, killing and stealing, is of course, the fastest way to achieve wealth. So the religion serves, among many others, the purpose of explaining these simple mechanics of living in a society.

Now, why do we have injustice and unfairness? Why do we have rich people who ruin the life of poor people? And why is it so hard to achieve happyness and live a happy life? Whenever we set a goal and work hard to achieve it, we find very soon, that now we need something else. We’re never completely satisfied with what we have, what we do, and how things are. The desire to always strive for something new is a fundamental pillar of being a human. Without it, we would just lie and do nothing. And eventually die, of course. But we must live, and we must make our lives better at all times. We find satisfaction in gettings things done the way we want them be. We take pleasure in exercising our free will, and exercising our power of will. And at some point when our will imposed on ourselves is satisfied, we start taking pleasure from imposing our will on others. And that’s, essentially, what we call the power. Powerfull people have control over many others and, combined with natural desire to always want more and better, become power-hungry.

When all of your needs are covered, you live in a big beautiful house, you eat in best restaraunts, and have whatever you can think of, what’s next? Power-hungry people ask: “Is that all there is to it?” The answer is “no”, of course. But anything beyond legal wealth is illegal. So, in a sense, it’s not that we have a few morally corrupt people who got power. The greed and inequality is a natural part of society.

Let’s step back, and look at the universe as a whole. The atoms, molecules, and particles stay in the universe, they never go away, and no new matter is produced. All atoms of a human body came to eat with the food. During the lifetime the cells die and get replaced by others. The body’s refuse leaves the body and becomes fertiliser, and part of something else eventually. Could be the grass, eaten by a cow, becoming beef on the table, and another human’s muscle. In this sense, the atoms of the universe never change. What changes is only the arrangement of the particles, transforming through endless series of organic matter.

Following this thought, people growing, diying, waging wars, giving charity is just a movement of particles. All powered by the only energy source available to our planet, the Sun. People worry a lot about what they have and where they are, which doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. There’s no common level of anxiety among people, some can be extremely stressed, and some will be totally calm, which has little to do with what people have. Some people hustle 16 hours a day, and some are lazy and barely lift a finger for any productive cause. Which leads me to think that the level of anxiety and engagement is just a function of personal capability to sustain it. You can’t make an anxious person stop worrying, and you can’t make a lazy person a high achiever.