Be born, maintain life, fuck, give birth, and die

Tada! You have won the game of life!

What is the meaning of life? Millions of latte-sipping waifs are gathered in coffee houses and discussing this even as you read these words. For all our hopes and aspirations towards finding something more meaningful in our short life span, we really only have one purpose: making more people.

Like every living creature our biological "meaning of life" revolves around preserving the species, or in essence breeding and keeping our kids alive. Every other animal and plant knows this. Be born- hatch, sprout, break free of your womb, whatever tickles your fancy- maintain your life until you're old enough to successfully breed, then fuck, give birth, and die so the new generation can do the same. It's our way to add another rung on the evolutionary ladder of life. Anything else done in between is just a garnish- lets say parsley, for argument's sake. Parsley can be anything that's not listed above as a life-purpose: art, making money, enriching our minds, literature, politics, organizing our closets, picking out leather interior for our cars, matching sofas with drapes, science, TV, etc. But in the end parsley is just an ostentatious little leaf meant to make some foods look better than others. It serves no real purpose. It's just for looking at. You can still eat without it there.

Hell, masturbation serves a better purpose in the art of preserving the species than most of those actions I just listed. In fact, anything other than being born, maintaining life, fucking, giving birth, and dying is really just mental masturbation. We do it to make ourselves feel good, but it leads nowhere really.

Yes, all of those things (i.e. art, science, literature, higher education) are necessary for civilization as we know it, but then again it's just a part of civilization that we really don't need if push came to shove. If a comet came down tomorrow and destroyed our homes and gyms and offices and McDonald's and Internet lines, life would still go on. However, if we didn't eat, sleep, have sex, and have kids then life would not go on. Evolution would come to a screeching halt and the entire food chain would be screwed as a result. It would be the end of the world as we know it. The 'stupider' creatures, as we like to call the organisms that can't read the useless words we write, know this. Oh they know all right, and they're just praying that we don't screw things up for them by losing sight of the real picture.

Yes, art and science are great things. It's amazing what the human mind can accomplish. However one cannot forget that in the long run (the long run being keeping the next generation of people alive long enough to make a new one) it doesn't matter how many DNA strands we've identified or how many Mona Lisa's we've hung in our little galleries. These things do nothing more than contribute to out own bloated sense of self-importance and the delusion that without our gyms and cell phones we would truly suffer. Not that I want to dump our technologies and run naked and hairy through the woods. A world without Coca-cola and air-conditioning certainly looks bleak to me. It's just that life would not stop if we lost our material possessions. In the words of Tyler Durden, "we are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world."

Rationality...we say it makes us superior to the other animals. We use it with our imagination to create these beautiful, wonderful things that make our civilizations astounding- but then we screw it up by blowing up a huge chunk of our own species with a nuclear bomb. Does rationality make us better animals? No, opposable thumbs and the common sense to save our own sorry hides in the face of mortal danger gives us superiority, if we have any superiority at all. One could go as far to say that our rationality makes us irrational. The things we create sometimes distract use from our real purpose- breed and stay alive as long as possible. That's the point of being born, isn't it? Isn't it better to make the species stronger and ensure the stability of the lives of generations to come? Or has our Freudian misconceptions made us so myopic that we can't see past our own cosmetically altered noses?

Life is a competition. The strongest survive. The survivors win. So far we're doing pretty well as a species. We're at the top of the food chain, somewhere around tigers and large reptiles. Truth be told you can have as many new and shiny things as you want. It won't hurt you one bit, but in the long run (the long run being propagation of the species) you can be spending the time spent getting your useless new stuff on finding a mate and strengthening the gene pool. If that sounds harsh, then this will sound even worse: if you're not breeding, you are of no use to the human race- even if only in the biological sense. Don't take it personally. This IS a competition after all, and so far sharks have us beaten hands (fins?) down. They are eating, breeding machines, and not a single cell of energy is wasted on any given day in their lives. You will not see a shark swimming extra miles to fit into a new cocktail dress, or having a heart attack because his stock dropped 20 points and now he can't afford to buy that matching quilt and sham set. Sharks are bags of crazy-scary teeth and muscles, only moving to eat, breed, give birth and protect themselves. This means that as a species they reign supreme on the food chain.

Hell, we're doing pretty damn well for hairless, flat-toothed, near-sighted apes, but we could do better. So the question really is: do you want to go buy that chrome-plated neon glowing lava lamp with matching magnetic poetry kit, or would you rather protect your spot in the penthouse of life on top of the food chain from brainless, large-toothed fish?

The choice is yours, but the stupider animals might kill you if you fuck it up. Choose wisely.