Ensayo Literario
Most people I’ve asked this question to have said that being happy is the me-
aning of life. I disagree. I have been alive for approximately 925 weeks. This
may seem like a lot, however the average person alive will live to see over 3700
weeks. That means I’m only a quarter of the way there, maybe even less. How
could I possibly know the answer to this question? Well you see, nearly four-
teen billion years ago the universe was born. Humans have been around for 250
thousand years. We are but a blink in the universal timeline. How could anyone
answer this question? Our planet is but a moist speck of dust in an arm of an ave-
rage galaxy in a small cluster in a massive universe. It’s hard to imagine that we
are special in any way after we see just how small we are. “Aristotle maintained
the view that the Earth, spherical in shape, is at rest at the center of the universe”
(Copleston, 1993). He could not have been more wrong.
This is, I think, where religion comes in. Bedtime stories help us sleep, and
there is no better bedtime story than that of God. The idea of God is what lets
many of us sleep at night. The idea that we matter, that there’s someone looking
out for us in this impenetrable darkness, is comforting. It helps us cope with
life, and it helps us not fear our eternal beds. Most of us love the idea that there
is something beyond this life, that death isn’t the end. “Plato declared that the
soul is immortal” (Copleston, 1993). This idea conflicts with my theory a little.
Why suffer through life if a better one is a small jump away? Our mortality is
what makes life worth it in my opinion. We are likely to never understand even
a percentage of how our universe truly works. The scraps of information allow
us to barely scratch the surface of our existence. “[Saint] Augustine clearly held
that the soul is created by God, but does not seem to have made up his mind as
to the precise time and mode of its origin” (Copleston, 1993).We are unlikely to
ever know what created the universe, our grand quest for knowledge may never
actually reveal any answers. Perhaps one day we will reach the Technological
Singularity, but by then we may not even be human anymore. “It is the one in-
dividual man who perceives not only that he reasons and understands, but also
that he feels, and exercises sensation” (Copleston, 1993). St. Thomas Aquinas
said this, it summarizes a large part of my theory.
So what if we never know the secrets of the universe? So what if the universe
will eventually go into Heat Death and everything we have ever done, and will
do will be meaningless? So what if human kind goes extinct in the next fifty
years? Everything we do is meaningless to the universe. That does not mean it
has to be meaningless to us. “[Mankind] differs from any animal race not merely
by its general superiority as a race, but by the human characteristics that every
single individual within the race is more than the race” (Copleston, 1994). Yes,
being happy is a part of the meaning of life, but it’s not all of it. I believe that the
meaning of life is to live. Yes, everything we do is pointless, and as depressing
as that sounds, it’s extremely liberating. We get to decide what it is we are meant
to do. We have overcome one of the greatest evolutionary barriers: sentient in-
telligence.
The universe is our playground now. We don’t have to abide by evolutionary
rules anymore, we get to make the rules and break them. The point of life is not
to be content where you are, it’s to take the universe for a ride. It’s to laugh and
cry, love and hate. It’s to fear and challenge, to contemplate and change. To feel
pain and pleasure, to build and destroy. We don’t need gods, for we are gods.
Whether we sit and watch a sunset or build a galactic empire, it’s entirely up to
us. We give our lives meaning, we are the meaning of life. ▪
Mateo Mac Gregor Briseño
12
Autarquía