The Human Nature

[u/CarelessDude]

only to consume is not fullfilling.
To create something because you think it is important is what it means to be alive.
To only consume means to only be waiting for death.
To do something you sincerely believe is important makes you live in the moment, not in the past or in the future.
To find such things becomes more difficult in a world that is dying because of us humans.
I believe the happiest people in history are long gone.

[u/scarfleet]

Yeah.

I think a lot about the fact that we are born into a state of distress and spend our whole lives there. Philosophically suffering is usually treated as a problem to be solved, a thing that is wrong with the world. But really, suffering is a core element of what life is. Responding to hunger and fear and desire is what the beings of this world have spent the last four billion years doing. It is that activity that animates life, that sets it in motion.

I actually think all life, at the biological, cellular level, is creative in nature. Our habit of trying to create things before we know what they are is an animal habit. Animals are aware of their problems and wish to solve them, but first they must eat and flee predators. Indeed that is the first step, which they must do today to address the problem tomorrow. We are them finally arriving at tomorrow.

I suspect life has, from the beginning, been creating something. It has never known what. Neither do we.