Home, Sweet, Bewildering Confounding, Unsettling Outer Space
We don’t know why we're here or where, exactly, here even is. But that’s okay.
As if it wasn’t enough that we have to deal with the uncomfortable awareness of our own mortality, we’re also damned to reckon with this preposterously inexplicable, physics-and-mind-bending universe, brazenly stretching to infinity in all directions.
I’d be delighted to attribute the whole thing to an organized and purposeful God who has created it all for our benefit. But I haven’t quite been able to pull that off, leaving me with a disconcerting sense that it’s probably all as random and purposeless as it appears.
Like Jason Bourne or Dorothy in Oz, We’ve awoken to find ourselves in some strange and unnerving world. I try not to belabor this thought since it is, well, unnerving. Mercifully, this is easy to do thanks to a rich plethora of distractions, both naturally occurring and fabricated on demand.
Unfortunately, I’ve spent too many trippy nights peering at dark desert skies through billowing clouds of pot smoke to ever put the thought too far from my mind. Even a casual glance upward from the driveway these days leaves me stunned at the immensity of our predicament.
Nobody knows what the heck’s going on. People know a lot of seemingly unknowable things, like what chemicals some spec in the sky is made out of. But when it comes to the big questions, a kid’s guess is as good as anyone’s.
Like Dorothy, we’ve got to figure it out as we go. But unlike The Land Of Oz, we woke up in a world strikingly devoid of shiny yellow paths to follow, or strawmen to advise us. We’re lost in space, on our own, without a Glinda.
Trying to figure out what to do with ourselves while we float around the Sun, as it floats around the Milky Way, and the Milky Way floats around whatever it is that it’s floating around, is a daunting and overwhelming responsibility. It’s one I’d prefer to avoid. I long to gleefully follow one flavor or another of pre-packaged religion, or even some whacked-out cult. But as I said, I can’t will myself to true-believerhood. I mean, how could any mortal be certain about what happens on higher planes or after we die? It all strikes me as implausibly definitive, and definitively implausible.
Another option is to simply do what everyone else is doing. My problem here is that this seems to be largely about busting ass to get ahead, or at least to make other people think I’m further along than they are.
As popular an approach as this is, I haven’t noticed any substantive correlation between my position on the ladder and feeling good. It’s possible that I just haven’t climbed high enough yet, but the few rungs I’ve mustered have provided, at best, a reduced amount of suffering. That’s not nothing. But it’s not enough to make me devote everything to painstakingly forging that kind of “success.”
Besides, I can’t say that the “do-wellers” appear to be any happier than we ne’er-do-wells. If anything, they seem more fearful, guarded, disconnected, and persnickety than average.
This has left me in the lurch. Without any explanation of why we’re here, I’ve turned to the next question of how we got here. For that, fortunately, there is a robustly certain answer. However the heck life ever originated, once it did, we evolved by natural selection, just like every other animal on the planet.
Like all animals, it turns out that we humans also spend our lives satisfying our intrinsic, biological drives. We are the same as every other creature on the planet, even though we might utilize VR and artisan water in the process.
Humans do have a somewhat broader array of basic drives than other animals, but they are still fairly limited. Of course, they may be met in an infinite number of ways.
I won’t try to list and rank our needs in a pyramid, like Maslow, because I don’t want to also be wrong. But, among other things, they include connecting, contributing, being respected, being included, learning new things, mastering skills, collaborating, creating, acquiring stuff, and of course, feasting and fornicating.
While other species are pretty clear about what their drives are and are not, it’s not so simple with us. Our technologies have flooded us with an abundance of options for what to do next, and how, precisely, to do it.
Parsing out our needs is complicated. Sometimes our instincts direct us to eat a whole box of donuts and wash it down with gin and Diazepam. Other times to work 80 hours a week for forty years without ever getting an opportunity to meet our children. The hard reality is that we humans have to give this matter considerable thought.
To help me figure out what is stirring inside me, I like to reverse engineer humanity through the lens of natural selection. What I’ve found by doing this is, aside from the urge to breathe, we have no more pressing drive than to connect and belong. This is because our impulse to be part of the bigger group had to be stronger than our long-standing urge to grab everything for ourselves and run. This is why connection ended up feeling soooo good. This biological triumph of restraint, generosity, and selflessness is what allowed us to cooperate so exquisitely. It’s what made us human.
To ensure our inclusion, we evolved an acutely compelling drive to be needed and necessary. Through this lens, I can’t help but see how thoroughly these drives pervade my behavior. Trying to be funny, working hard, seeking social followers, and promoting book sales are all good examples. However ineffective and misguided these tactics may ultimately be, they can all easily be seen as modern attempts to make myself appealing and important to my tribe, and to ensure that I’m not about to be cast out to the saber-tooth tigers.
It’s not that working hard is a bad thing to do. It is, after all, my way of making a contribution. It is critical to our mental health and collective well-being that we are all doing this. But expecting a true sense of belonging to come from the stats page at Medium is a wildly miscalculated reach.
By understanding this, I can more effectively seek a sense of belonging by immersing myself in small, mutually dependant groups of folks that truly have each other’s backs, like friends, family, improv teams, and bandmates.
It may seem like a shallow dictate to spend our lives doing nothing more than satisfying our basic needs. But it is not. When we uncover the true nature of our basic drives, and separate them from our misguided and mindless impulses, they lead us to all kinds of rich, rewarding expressions of growth, creation, connection, and joy. Above all else, our social wiring uniquely drives us to do things to make other people’s lives better. It’s hard to find more meaningful meaning than that.
Seeking to satisfy our unique human needs is what our biology compels us to do. As such, it aligns precisely with whatever forces conspired to put us here in space to begin with. I can’t imagine any activity more true to our nature. Or any more meaningful way to navigate the cosmos.
If you liked this, you might also like this comic essay about pretending to be okay, even when we’re not.
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All comics ©2021 by David Milgrim
Just trying to feel okay, one comic at a time